Lewis Dartnell

BG Biogeosciences

The 2006 Young Scientist Outstanding Poster Paper (YSOPP) Award is awarded to Lewis Dartnell for the poster/PICO entitled:

Life on Mars? Modelling the subsurface radiation environment (Dartnell, L. R.; Ward, J. M.; Coates, A. J.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Lewis is a PhD student in CoMPLEX (Centre for Mathematics & Physics in the Life Sciences and Experimental Biology), University College London. He is looking into the question of whether martian life could be surviving near the surface, in terms of the hazardous flux of radiation from space. This multidisciplinary research is supported by two supervisors, a space physicist and a biochemist. He has firstly written a computer model of various scenarios to calculate likely survival times, and is now moving into lab work to follow-up on these results. Lewis also freelances as a popular science writer, website: http://www.ucl.ac.uk. The reviewers found the idea of assessing the potential survivability of life in the Martian subsurface outstanding.