Cosmic Biology: How Life Could Evolve on Other Worlds

As a neurobiologist, Louis Neal Irwin has been a student of evolution, complexity, and behavior over a 40 year career of academic teaching and research. Irwin has published close to 60 original research articles, literature and book reviews, encyclopedia entries, and commentaries on the brain, behavior, and evolution, including one book ("Scotophobin") on the early development of neuroscience.

Ten years ago, Irwin became a Solar System Educator for NASA, originally in conjunction with the launch of the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn but later as representative for all the robotic exploratory missions managed by the Jet Propulsion Lab. In that capacity he became familiar with the details of space exploration for the purpose of conducting teacher workshops. Soon thereafter, he also began a collaboration with Dirk Schulze-Makuch on research into the definition of life and the plausibility of searching for and finding life onother worlds. As NASA turned its attention to the emerging field of astrobiology, Schulze-Makuch and Irwin began to publish their research in that area, culminating in the joint authorship of "Life in the Universe: Expectations and Constraints," which many regard as the definitive work in the field of astrobiology for the technical specialist.

Dirk Schulze-Makuch

As a trained hydrogeologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch entered the field of astrobiology by studing extremophilic organisms in hot springs. Propelled by a major NASA grant Dirk then joined the Europa Focus Group and some time later the Titan Focus Group of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. Recent interests include nearly all aspects of astrobiology including mission-aligned efforts to detect life on Mars and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.