Nathalie Carrasco

Nathalie Marie Carrasco (born in 1977) is a French chemist and professor of astronomy and astrophysics. She is a specialist in atmospheric chemistry at the Atmosphere, Environments and Space Observations Laboratory (LATMOS) at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. In 2016, she was awarded the Irène Joliot-Curie Prize in the category Young Woman Scientist. Biography Nathalie Carrasco attended the École Normale Supérieure - Cachan where she earned her baccalaureate. She first became interested in chemistry and defended her Ph.D. thesis in 2005 at the University of Paris 7, in the inter-university Laboratory of Atmospheric Systems (LISA), on terrestrial air quality. The same year, when the European lander Huygens landed on Titan, a satellite of Saturn, its findings revealed the complexity of Titan's atmosphere and the need for chemists to work on it. Carrasco targeted Titan in her work. She earned her post-doctoral habilitation at the University of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in 2012. Research As part of a European research project called “ERC,” Carrasco has been studying the upper atmosphere of Titan, in which an intense prebiotic chemistry develops.