The Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe (LCLU) is delighted to welcome Dr Adomas ("Adam") Valantinas as the first LCLU Senior Fellow.
A planetary scientist from Lithuania, Adam studies the geological and chemical history of Mars to understand whether the planet once hosted environments suitable for life. His research combines remote sensing, laboratory experiments, and geochemistry to investigate how water shaped the Martian surface and mineral record.
Adam completed his studies in astronomy, physics, and geophysics at Vilnius University and the University of Copenhagen before earning his PhD at the University of Bern. He subsequently held a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Mobility Fellowship at Brown University and ETH Zurich, where he investigated water-rock interactions on Mars and the potential for subsurface habitable environments.
At Cambridge, Adam will work with Professor Nick Tosca to investigate one of the most intriguing discoveries made by NASA's Perseverance rover: the "leopard spot" features observed in rocks within Jezero Crater. These chemical patterns resemble features that, on Earth, can be associated with microbial activity. Adam's research will test whether they can instead be explained by purely geological and chemical processes.
Understanding how these features formed will provide new insights into the environmental history of Mars and may also shed light on processes that operated on the early Earth during the emergence of life.