Louisa Preston is a Lecturer in Planetary Science and Astrobiology, and author, based at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UCL, UK. She works in environments across the Earth, where life is able to survive our planet’s most extreme conditions, using them as blueprints for possible extra-terrestrial life forms and habitats. She has worked on projects for NASA and the Canadian, European and UK Space Agencies, and is a Co-I for the PanCam instrument onboard the ExoMars 2022 Rosalind Franklin rover. The only thing she enjoys more than devising ways to find life on Mars is writing about it. She has published numerous articles and academic papers, and her first book - Goldilocks and the Water Bears - is out now. She is also an avid believer in the power of science communication, having regularly appeared on radio and television programmes and spoken about the search for life on Mars at the TED Conference in 2013, as a TED Fellow.