Dr. Mitchell D. Schulte

Mitch Schulte earned his PhD in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Washington University in St. Louis in 1997. He has been a Research Scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California since July 2000. He is on the editorial board of the journal Astrobiology and is a Co-Investigator on the NASA Ames Astrobiology Institute team. As of September 1, 2005, he will begin an appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Missouri - Columbia. Dr. Schulte is the Chief Scientist of a field-based study of ophiolite terranes in northern California as habitats for extremophiles and as analogs for a potential martian biosphere.? These terranes are land-based analogs of the Lost City hydrothermal fields. He also studies the organic geochemistry of hydrothermal systems, currently focusing on the behavior of sulfur and the abiotic formation of organic compounds in terrestrial and extraterrestrial geochemical systems.