Sarah Stewart Johnson

Sarah Stewart Johnson is the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of Planetary Science at Georgetown University, where she’s principal investigator at her Johnson Biosignatures Lab. She researches the presence and preservation of traces of life within planetary environments, and her lab analyzes data from spacecraft and devises new techniques for future missions. Johnson has participated on the science teams for NASA’s Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity rovers, and since 2016 has been a visiting scientist with the Planetary Environments Lab at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The author of the award-winning book, The Sirens of Mars, her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harvard Review, and the Best American Science and Nature Writing.