I received a steady diet of Jules Verne books growing up and loved them. Reading him, I think I had this idea that I wanted to be a scientist, but the good days of exploration, of finding really new stuff, were probably over. There's been enormous discoveries over the last little while: the discoveries on Mars from the Curiosity Rover, the discovery of some of these ocean worlds, and the discovery of all of these exoplanets now. And one of the things that's been an emerging theme amongst all of that is the idea of looking at using the Earth as a lens to understand how you might research elsewhere. So the kind of work that we do, right here in Canada, to understand the subsurface of our planet is actually helping to shed some light on possible ways of exploring all of those planets and beyond, all of that extraterrestrial real estate.

Obviously I've learned not to say, oh, yeah, I'm an isotope geochemist because it does tend to shut down the conversation. What do I research? Well, I research water. One of the wonderful things about working in earth sciences is that the problems of science that you are facing in earth sciences are so fundamentally important to the human race. You've got people who are coming in either because they're passionate about the search for life, they're passionate about understanding the ways in which studying this planet can inform astrobiology and the search for life elsewhere. There's huge amounts that we still don't understand. There's huge frontiers for exploration, as well as knowledge.

If you're passionate about something, you're probably going to find out something nobody else has ever figured out before. I certainly never expected, as a kid when I thought that it would be fun to do this, that it could possibly be this much fun.