David T. Flannery

David Flannery joined the School of Earth, Environmental and Biological Sciences at QUT in 2019 to develop capabilities in the fields of deep-time geology and astrobiology. David graduated from Macquarie University in 2009 with a major in paleobiology, before attending Peking University's College of Urban and Environmental Science and MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences as a Visiting Research Scholar. He received a PhD from the University of New South Wales in 2014 for research into evidence for life and early terrestrial environments preserved in Archean (4-2.5 billion-year-old) rocks in Western Australia. In 2014–2015, while a Caltech Postdoctoral Scholar based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), he studied molecular evidence for ancient microbial metabolisms preserved in Earth's oldest known fossils, and worked on the development of lithochemistry instruments that were later selected to fly on NASA's Mars 2020 Rover Mission.