Mary Voytek
Director of NASA Astrobiology Program and USGS microbiologist
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Through Astrobiology, Life and Exoplanet
Education
B.A. in biology, Johns Hopkins University, 1980
M.S. in Biological Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, 1984
Ph.D. in Biology/Ocean Sciences, University of California, 1995
Postdoctoral Fellow, Rutgers University Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences, 1995–1997
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Research and Professional Activities
Voytek's primary scientific interests are biogeochemistry and aquatic microbial ecology; more particularly, environmental controls on microbial transformations of nutrients, xenobiotics, and metals in freshwater and marine systems. She has worked in several extreme environments, including Antarctica, hypersaline lakes, deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and terrestrial deep-subsurface sites. Voytek has conducted deep biosphere studies at the Chesapeake Bay Impact Structure.
Voytek was a staff scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund (1987–1990) prior to completing her PhD at the University of Rhode Island. After her postdoc at Rutgers University she was a visiting research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Limnology in Plön, Germany from 1997 to 1998. Voytek joined the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Research Program in 1998 where she led the Microbiology and Molecular Ecology team until 2009. She was an invited scholar for the German-American Frontiers of Science (1997 and 2001), and she received a USGS Superior Service Award in 2005. She took charge of the NASA Astrobiology Program on September 15, 2008, as Interim Senior Scientist for Astrobiology in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters.
Voytek has been a member of the American Geophysical Union since 1990, and she served as the secretary of the AGU Biogeosciences section from 2004 to 2006 and was the Biogeosciences section meeting chair from 2003 to 2006. She is currently a board member of the American Geophysical Union. Voytek is also a member of the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) (1984 to present) and the American Society of Microbiology (1991 to present).
She has served on several advisory groups to Department of the Interior, Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and NASA, including the Planetary Protection Subcommittee. She has also supported NASA's Astrobiology Program serving as a NASA representative to a number of COSPAR convened studies exploring the potential for life in the universe. She has held positions in several science societies.
In December 2010, she defended a news release of NASA on the possibility there might be a principally wider basis of life than so far assumed, following conclusions of a study by Felisa Wolfe-Simon on the arsenic-eating bacterium GFAJ-1, as presenting a "phenomenal finding".