Lynn Rothschild is a Senior Scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and an adjunct professor at Brown University. Her research spans evolutionary biology, astrobiology, and synthetic biology, with a focus on how life evolved on Earth and how that knowledge might apply to the possibility of life elsewhere. She founded NASA's synthetic biology programme and has explored how biology could serve as an enabling technology for human space exploration. She led the first free-flyer synthetic biology payload, which flew on the DLR EuCROPIS mission, and has been a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) fellow eight times across Phases 1 through 3. She is a fellow of the Linnean Society of London, the California Academy of Sciences, and the Explorer's Club, and a past president of the Society of Protozoologists.