MV
Member Since 1990
Mary A. Voytek
Senior Scientist, NASA Headquarters
Member, Honors and Recognition Committee; Chair, Union Fellows Committee
Professional Experience
NASA Headquarters
Senior Scientist
2008 - Present
Education
Doctorate
1995
Honors & Awards
Ambassador Award
Received December 2022
Citation
Mary Voytek is a transformative leader in the biogeosciences community. Her contributions over a 40-year career that is still unfolding exemplify the AGU values embodied by the Ambassador Award. Beginning in the 1990s, during an era in which most geoscientists saw “biogeosciences” as an oxymoron, she was a key leader in the movement that brought environmental microbiology and astrobiology into AGU, eventually helping to found and lead the Biogeosciences section.

Later, at NASA, Mary reshaped the Astrobiology Program to empower an emerging generation of scientists who viewed astrobiology as their primary focus and mission relevance as a priority. Going far beyond normal program manager duties and taking serious professional risk, she was a key figure driving a wholesale reorganization of NASA’s planetary sciences programs to infuse them with astrobiology objectives. More recently, Mary shifted astrobiology community leadership from a centralized institute to a distributed “research coordination network” that she is nurturing toward maturity and has advocated for community definitions, community standards and consensus building around the standards of evidence needed to guide public and scientific discourse about the search for life on other worlds. Along the way, Mary worked extensively and systematically to elevate new talent into positions of responsibility, such as by recruiting and mentoring future scientist-administrators in astrobiology through the NASA Management Postdoctoral Fellow program.

Most recently, she advanced the global astrobiology community through her leadership of the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Tokyo Tech. Mary has made it a priority to develop the international astrobiology community by fostering an integrative, collaborative and internationalist culture that makes ELSI a welcoming home for students and visiting scholars from around the world. If the day comes when there is credible evidence of life elsewhere, Mary’s leadership will have led us toward understanding, debating and interpreting that evidence as a unified global science community.

— Ariel D. Anbar
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona
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Union Fellow
Received December 2022
Publications
AGU Abstracts
NASA Astrobiology Program Early Career Resources and Opportunities: Past, Present, Future
INITIATIVES WITHIN AND RESOURCES FOR THE EARLY CAREER ASTROBIOLOGY COMMUNITY III ONLINE SESSION
philosophy, history, education and community development | 16 may 2022
Melissa Kirven, Mary A. Voytek, Daniella Scalice
Over the past 20 years the Astrobiology Program has assembled and evolved a large suite of programs and opportunities to encourage and support early c...
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Searching for Extant Life on Mars: What's Next?
GETTING THE MOST OUT OF ASTROBIOLOGICAL DATA: OVERCOMING THE TOO LITTLE, TOO RARE, AND TOO DIFFERENT POSTERS
planetary sciences | 10 december 2019
Brandi L. Carrier, David Beaty, Michael A. Meyer, ...
From Nov. 5th -8th, 2019 we conducted the conference Mars Extant Life: Whats Next? in Carlsbad, NM. This three-and-one-half-day conference focused on ...
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Astrobiology: How to Search for Life Beyond Earth.
FALL MEETING 2018
13 december 2018
Mary A. Voytek
View Abstract
Volunteer Experience
2024 - 2025
Chair
Union Fellows Committee
2024 - 2025
Member
Honors and Recognition Committee
2023 - 2023
Member
Union Fellows Committee
Check out all of Mary A. Voytek’s AGU Research!
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