Dirk Schulze-Makuch is a professor for planetary habitability and astrobiology at the Technical University Berlin, Germany, and also an adjunct professor at Washington State University and Arizona State University. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and worked afterward as senior project hydrologist at Envirogen, Inc. Dirk continued his academic career as an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. During that time he was also a faculty fellow at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. In 2004 he took a faculty position, first as an associate professor, then as a full professor at Washington State University.  Dirk received the Friedrich-Wilhelm Bessel Award from the Humboldt Foundation for extraordinary achievements in theoretical biology in 2011.  Since 2013 Dirk is a professor at the Technical University Berlin, where he leads the Astrobiology Research Group. He published in the greater research field of habitability and astrobiology more than 200 scientific articles and also 9 books, the latest being The Cosmic Zoo: Complex Life on Many Worlds and the 3rd edition of Life in the Universe: Expectations and Constraints.