Our guest is Dr. Penny Boston, Portfolio Scientist for the Science Organization at the NASA Ames Research Center, as well as a speleologist, and astrobiologist. Dr. Boston is the former director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, as well as the associate director of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Among her research interests are geomicrobiology of caves and mines, extraterrestrial speleogenesis, space exploration, and astrobiology. She has spent her career exploring some of the most extreme underground environments on the planet, and is a pioneer in the field of understanding the potential for subsurface life beyond Earth.