Patrick Durkin BOSS Deputy editor Aug 7, 2019 – 9.36am Save Share

Finding life on Mars is a pretty high career goal to set yourself. But the softly spoken and no-frills Brisbane geologist and astrobiologist Dr Abigail Allwood has never thought in those terms.

“I think every step along the way I broke the rules of what you are supposed to do to get where you want to be,” she says. “They say ‘Set your sights on what you want to get and work really hard.’ There was no way I could have ever envisioned I would have ended up working at NASA, and once I did that, no way [I would have] ended up as a principal investigator.”

The red planet awaits. Mars is more than a destination – it's a laboratory. NASA

Allwood has been appointed as one of seven principal investigators on the Mars 2020 rover team in charge of searching for life on Mars. She is the first female and the first Australian principal investigator on a NASA Mars mission. Her achievements have caused her to be named among the BOSS True Leaders 2019.

Pivotal in Allwood’s career was the decision to go from undergraduate degree in geoscience to a PhD at Macquarie University. It was a tough call, she says, “because that meant giving up a pretty reasonable job in the oil industry at Woodside”.

“I had no job prospects at all. I could just as well have ended up as a taxi driver, I think,” she says, tongue firmly in her cheek. “I had always loved space, but by the time I got to that point in my life I had pretty much given up on it. It was not really a realistic thing for a woman growing up in Australia at that time.”

While completing her PhD, Allwood gained renown after finding evidence of life in 3.5-billion-year-old stromatolites – columns of sedimentary rock created by layers of microbes – in the Pilbara region in Western Australia.

Her discovery featured on the cover of the journal Nature and brought her to the attention of NASA. She went on to do postdoctoral work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“The thesis work I did was directly relevant to the search for life on Mars,” she says. “Evidence of life just fell out of the woodwork, so to speak.