Zita Martins

Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal







Zita Martins is an Astrobiologist, Associate Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) and Co-Director of the MIT-Portugal Program. She graduated in Chemistry at IST and obtained a PhD in Astrobiology at the University of Leiden. She was an Invited Scientist at NASA Goddard and Invited Professor at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis. She was awarded by the Royal Society with a University Research Fellowship worth 1 million pounds, having remained at Imperial College London for 10 years. Zita Martins is Co-Investigator of two projects (OREOcube and EXOcube) of the European Space Agency (ESA) that will be onboard the International Space Station. She is also a member of the ESA ARIEL space mission, of the Japanese Space Agency Hayabusa2 space mission, and of the ESA Comet Interceptor space mission. One of her major scientific interests is the search for life in icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and therefore she has been doing Arctic research as an analogue for those icy moons.