The Barrie Jones Award Public Lecture

18:00 - 19:00 This event will be live streamed from the Berrill Theatre.

Dr.Louisa Preston, UK Space Agency Aurora Research Fellow in Astrobiology at Birkbeck University of London

The search for life in the Universe is one of humanity's last great adventures and we are closer than ever to sending humans out to Mars and other planets and moons in the cosmos, to seek this life out. What are the chances of finding life on Mars, Europa, or Titan and what might it look like? Astrobiologists are trying to figure out where other forms of life might be hiding, how we can find it, and what it might be able to tell us about ourselves and where we came from. This talk will steer you through the exciting and incredible search for life in the Universe. Louisa has worked on projects for NASA and the Canadian, European and UK Space Agencies studying environments across the Earth, where life is able to survive our planet’s most extreme conditions, using them as blueprints for possible extra-terrestrial life forms and habitats. She is an avid science communicator having spoken about the search for life on Mars at the TED Conference in 2013, and her first book Goldilocks and the Water Bears: The Search for Life in the Universe is out now by Bloomsbury Sigma. Follow her on Twitter @LouisaJPreston and her personal webpage: louisa-preston.com