Simon George
Associate Professor, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences,
Macquarie University, Sydney

I am an organic geochemist with diverse interests. My areas of research include the chemical record of early life on Earth, as recorded in fine grained rocks, fossils, stromatolites and fluid inclusions. I also work on lipids in recent sediments, fuel spills in Antarctica, and many aspects of petroleum geochemistry. I worked at CSIRO (Australia’s main scientific research agency) for 15 years, and moved to Macquarie University in 2006. I now teach a basic geoscience/environmental science first year unit (Planet Earth), and started a new second year astrobiology unit (Life, the Universe and Everything) which has proved very popular with the students here. I supervise a group of PhD students, some of whom work on Precambrian geochemistry, including doing fieldwork in the Pilbara.