Dr. Kasthuri Venkateswaran (Venkat) is the senior research scientist at JPL and supports the Biotechnology and Planetary Protection Group. His 39+ years of research encompass marine, food, and environmental microbiology. He has applied his research of molecular microbial analysis to better understand the ecological aspects of microbes while conducting field studies in several extreme environments such as the deep sea (2,500 m), spacecraft missions (Mars Exploration Rovers), assembly facility clean rooms, and the space environment in Earth's orbit (the ISS). He also provides expertise to non-NASA programs such as commercial agencies (Boeing—airline cabin air measurement) and medical industries (tissue and organ transplant processing). The bioinformatics databases generated by Venkat’s team are extremely useful in the development of biosensors and will provide information about spacecraft surfaces and enclosed habitats in an attempt to determine forward contamination as well as to develop countermeasures (advance cleaning and sterilization technologies) to control problematic microbial species.