Dr. Papineau was born in 1977 in Montréal, Québec, Canada and his mother tongue is French. He was the first Canadian selected to participate in the NASA Astrobiology Academy in 1999. Papineau obtained his B.Sc. in Physics (major) and Biochemistry (minor) from McGill University in 2001, which included coursework in Astrophysics and research on extra-solar planetary systems at the Université de Montréal. In 2006, he obtained a Ph.D. in Geological Sciences and Astrobiology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the United States of America. After his PhD, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and then an assistant professor at Boston College, before crossing the Atlantic Ocean to join the University College London in 2013. Here, he is based in the London Centre for Nanotechnology, and he built the Geological Spectroscopy Laboratory in the Department of Earth Sciences. He uses micro- and nanoscale analytical approaches to study the composition of minerals in old rocks, including the oldest on Earth, to identify biosignatures in them. His work on the origin and early evolution of life aims at preparing for exobiological studies. He also teaches the modules Earth Materials and Geoscience Report and he now serves as the new Director of the Centre for Planetary Sciences at UCL.