Nathalie Cabrol

She was born on August 30, 1963, in Bagneux, France; she is married, has no children and is a U.S. citizen.⁠[1]

She completed undergraduate studies in Earth science at Université Paris 10 Nanterre, earned a master’s degree on the Martian valleys Ma’adim Vallis and Dao Vallis at Université Paris 1 (Sorbonne) in 1986, and received her PhD there in December 1991 for research on the evolution of water on Mars.⁠[1]

The SETI Institute describes her as the first woman in France to receive a PhD in planetary geology.⁠[2]

From 1992 she did postdoctoral research at the Observatoire de Meudon in Paris and then at NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry Ames Research Center; from 1998 she worked at NASA Ames as a SETI Institute researcher.⁠[3]

In the summer of 1997 the Nomad rover made a 45-day traverse of Chile’s Atacama Desert, one week of which was devoted to science experiments including a Mars mission simulation, science on the fly and a meteorite search; she was lead author of the science results overview published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets in 2001.⁠[4]

As NASA science team leader, she said the team spotted a possibly fossil-bearing rock with the rover’s cameras and had it retrieved, but lab analysis could not establish whether it had once held life, a situation very close to what future Mars exploration might face.⁠[5]

She joined the SETI Institute in 1998 as a senior astrobiologist; she holds the women’s world records for free diving and scuba diving at altitude.⁠[6]

She was spokesperson for selecting Gusev crater as the landing site for the Mars Exploration Rover mission’s Spirit rover and was a member of the mission’s science team from 2002 to 2019.⁠[6]

As principal investigator and expedition leader of a NASA Astrobiology Institute-funded project, she led seven expeditions in 2002–2008 to volcanic lakes including Licancabur, Aguas Calientes and Poquentica and to lower lakes in Bolivia, documenting these extreme lake ecosystems by scuba and free diving as analogs to ancient Martian lakes.⁠[3]

The October 27–November 23, 2003, expedition, funded by NASA and the National Geographic Society, studied microbes under intense UV and low oxygen in lakes including Licancabur volcano’s crater lake at nearly 20,000 feet; the previous year’s expedition had found diatoms with 10 times more deformities than in other lakes.⁠[7]

In October 2005 she carried Wings WorldQuest Flag #1 on an 800-kilometer trek across the Altiplano, climbing Licancabur and Poquentica volcanoes in harsh weather, collecting ice, mud and permafrost samples and setting up a new data station.⁠[8]

From October 27 to December 7, 2006, the High Lakes Project sent a 15-member team to the summit lakes of Licancabur, Poquentica and Aguas Calientes volcanoes, diving to the lake beds for the first time with oxygen rebreathers so that exhaled carbon dioxide would not contaminate the water.⁠[9]

As principal investigator she led the NASA ASTEP-funded Planetary Lake Lander project, a three-year field campaign at Laguna Negra in Chile’s central Andes, where ice is melting rapidly, to test lake lander technologies for exploring the hydrocarbon lakes of Saturn’s moon Titan and to study how deglaciation affects life in glacial lakes.⁠[10]

At the TED2015 conference she gave the talk How Mars might hold the secret to the origin of life, explaining how fieldwork at sites such as high-altitude Andean lakes can help the search for signs of life on Mars.⁠[11]

In August 2015 the SETI Institute announced her appointment to head its Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, overseeing multidisciplinary research into the nature and distribution of life beyond Earth; President and CEO Bill Diamond said the move would bring new vitality to the institute’s mission.⁠[12]

In 2016 the writer Helen Macdonald traveled with her team to the high-altitude regions of Chile for an in-depth New York Times Magazine profile; she was then also principal investigator of the SETI team of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.⁠[13]

On the 2020 International Day of Women and Girls in Science she gave a speech at United Nations Headquarters in New York.⁠[14]

In 2021 Le Seuil published her Voyage aux frontières de la vie; she said she had left France thirty years earlier and wrote the first draft in English before translating it into French herself.⁠[15]

The rights agency describes the memoir as tracing her scientific path through letters, expedition diaries and photographs, including the Nomad rover traverse of the Atacama Desert and her high-altitude research at the Licancabur crater lake.⁠[14]

She appeared on episode 348 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing work in extreme environments, water and life on Mars, the origin of life, the Fermi paradox, diving in volcanic lakes and surviving an earthquake on a volcano.⁠[16]

In January 2023 Le Seuil published her À l’aube de nouveaux horizons, which reviews the state of the search for extraterrestrial life and explores the definition of life.⁠[17]

At that year’s London Book Fair, English-language rights were sold at auction to Simon & Schuster for a six-figure sum, and Italian, Polish and South Korean publishers also acquired rights.⁠[18]

The English edition is titled The Secret Life of the Universe. On October 30, 2024, Simon & Schuster UK published a 320-page paperback; the book begins with the origin of life on Earth, surveys Venus, Mars, the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and Pluto, and then turns to potentially habitable exoplanets in the galaxy.⁠[19]

On January 16, 2025, Julliard published her Inséparables: Les destins croisés de la Terre et de la vie.⁠[20]

She followed her editor Adrien Bosc from Le Seuil to Julliard; the essay recounts the emergence and evolution of life on Earth and discusses the human-driven environmental crisis and the prospects of technology and artificial intelligence.⁠[21]

In 2026 Julliard published her first science-fiction thriller, Dimensions, a story built around the reappearance of secret notebooks kept by Leonardo da Vinci late in life and strange extraterrestrial objects crashing in the Andes, engraved with symbols.⁠[22]

As of October 2026, the SETI Institute’s profile says she manages more than 120 researchers across seven divisions and that WIRED listed her in 2026 among the world’s 60 smartest thinkers.⁠[2]

X: Public account: https://x.com/shasta721 (opens in a new window)⁠[16]

SETI Institute: Official website: https://www.seti.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[16]