Samuel Kounaves

Shortly before joining the chemistry faculty at Tufts University in 1988, Samuel Kounaves received a Ph.D from the Université de Genève, Switzerland. “Though I spent my childhood watching Star Trek and wanting to explore other planets, my first taste of the unknown came in the first year of my MS degree at Cal State San Diego in 1976, using sensors in submarines to measure trace metals at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.” Kounaves did not realise then that it was the start of his career in “extreme”analytical science. “In the summer of 2008, we were analysing the soil on the surface of Mars – finally I was doing what I had only imagined 30 years earlier.”