Sarah Rugheimer looks for signs of life on other planets by studying the telltale chemical signatures on distant planets.

Why you should listen

TED Fellow Sarah Rugheimer is an astronomer and astrobiologist at Oxford, where she's learning how to find life on another planet. She studies how stars' high energy radiation might help or hamper our efforts to discover new life and explores how a planet's atmosphere changes over geological time. Her work is used to inform future telescope development and observation planning, such as for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. Outside of her research, she cohosts a podcast for women in STEM called Self-care with Drs. Sarah.

Sarah Rugheimer’s TED talk