Frances Westall
2025
Anticipation Committee member
Pulse of Science
Frances Westall studied geology at the Universities of Edinburgh in Scotland and Cape Town in South Africa. She refers to herself as a scientific "vagabond", having worked in many countries including a postdoc in marine geology at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven (Germany), followed by research in geobiology (fossil bacteria) at the Universities of Nantes (France) and Bologna (Italy). She was a senior researcher at the NASA Johnson Space Center and the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston (USA) in the period after the announcement of possible traces of life in the martian meteorite ALH84001 by David McKay and his group before becoming the leader of the Exobiology Group of the CNRS in Orléans (France) in 2002, a position she took over from André Brack, a noted prebiotic chemist. She was head of the French Exobiology society from 2006-2008. Specialising in the oldest traces of life on Earth, she is very involved in the 2018 international mission to Mars from the instrumental side (microscope/close-up imager) and from the science side as well.
