Pascale Ehrenfreund

The main-belt asteroid 9826 Ehrenfreund is named in her honor. Since 2022, she is president of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR).

Biography

Pascale Ehrenfreund was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1960. She began her university studies at the University of Vienna, where she studied astronomy and biology. She went on to earn a degree in molecular biology at the Institute of Molecular Biology, Salzburg (Austrian Academy of Sciences) in 1988 and then completed her doctorate in astrophysics at the University of Paris VII and the University of Vienna in 1990. Her post-doctorate studies were conducted at the Leiden Observatory as a Fellow of the European Space Agency ESA and later at the Service d'Aeronomie, Verrières-le-Buisson, France, as a Fellow of the French space agency Centre national d'études spatiales (CNES). In 1993, she received the Marie Curie Fellowship by the European Commission. In 1996, she accepted the APART scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, to prepare her research in astrochemistry for her habilitation Thesis at the University of Vienna. She earned her Habilitation degree on the topic of "Cosmic Dust" in 1999 and in 2008 went on to earn a master's degree in Management and Leadership from Webster University in Leiden, Netherlands.

Beginning in 1999, she worked at the Leiden Observatory and was a professor at both the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University in the Netherlands. She was also a professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. In 2001, she became the head of the Astrobiology Laboratory at Leiden and participated as the teamleader, co-investigator and principal investigator in numerous experiments and space missions sponsored by both ESA and NASA. In 2005, Pascale Ehrenfreund came to the United States to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California as distinguished Visiting Scientist. In 2008, she accepted a position as a research professor and policy expert at the Space Policy Institute of George Washington University (GWU) in Washington, D.C. and as a senior scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute. From 2008 - 2012 she was the project scientist of NASA's O/OREOS satellite. Pascale Ehrenfreund has written over 300 scientific research papers, holds an H-index of 81 and published 12 books.

In 2013, she was selected as the first woman to head the Austrian Science Fund (German: Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung) (FWF) (2013-2015).

From 2015-2020, she was the first woman to lead the German Aerospace Center (German: Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V.) (DLR).

The main-belt asteroid, 9826 Ehrenfreund was named in her honor.