Linda Kah has been pursuing her love of science since kindergarten, when she announced her intention to become a geologist. She received concurrent BS and MS degrees from MIT in 1990, followed by a PhD from Harvard in 1997. In her research, Kah combines her knowledge of geology, isotope geochemistry and biology to decipher how ecosystems arise on planets, and how biological processes fundamentally interact with, and even change, geological systems. Her research has taken her to some of the most remote places on Earth, including the Canadian Arctic, Saharan West Africa, and the high Andes of Argentina; and continues to take her to even more remote localities, as she begins exploration of Gale Crater on the surface of Mars with NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission. “I was brought into the mission seven years ago for the express reason that I knew almost nothing about Mars,” she recalls. Email: lckah@utk.edu. Web: http://web.eps.utk.edu/faculty/kah.html.