Finding Life: Spectral Biomarkers in Planetary Atmospheres

Physicist at Freie Universität Berlin Receives Freigeist Fellowship from the Volkswagen Foundation. No 225/2017 from Aug 24, 2017 The physicist Dr. Andreas Elsaesser from Freie Universität Berlin has been granted a Freigeist Fellowship from the Volkswagen Foundation for his research project "Finding Life: Spectral Biomarkers in Planetary Atmospheres." With the Freigeist grant of roughly one million euros, he aims to investigate molecules to determine whether they offer signs of possible life on other planets. A major focus will be on the stability and spectral detectability of organic molecules that can potentially be detected as so-called biomarkers or biosignatures in the atmosphere of a planet. Andreas Elsaesser majored in physics at the Technical University of Munich and completed his doctorate in biophysics in 2012 at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, UK. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Since 2015 he has been a Postdoc International Fellow (POINT Fellow) and since 2017 Marie-Curie Fellow at Freie Universität in the NanoScale Focus Area and research assistant in the Experimental Molecular Biophysics Group. One of his main areas of research is the interaction between radiation and matter, in particular, the effects of radiation on organic molecules and biological systems.