Pascale Ehrenfreund was born in
Vienna,
Austria, in 1960. She began her university studies at the
University of Vienna, where she studied
astronomy and biology. She went on to earn a degree in molecular biology at the
Institute of Molecular Biology, Salzburg (
Austrian Academy of Sciences) in 1988 and then completed her doctorate in
astrophysics at the
University of Paris VII and the University of Vienna in 1990. Her post-doctorate studies were conducted at the
Leiden Observatory as a Fellow of the
European Space Agency ESA and later at the Service d'Aeronomie, Verrières-le-Buisson, France, as a Fellow of the French space agency
Centre national d'études spatiales (CNES). In 1993, she received the
Marie Curie Fellowship by the
European Commission. In 1996, she accepted the APART scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, to prepare her research in astrochemistry for her
habilitation Thesis at the University of Vienna. She earned her
Habilitation degree on the topic of "Cosmic Dust" in 1999 In 2001, she became the head of the Astrobiology Laboratory at Leiden and participated as the teamleader, co-investigator and principal investigator in numerous experiments and space missions sponsored by both ESA and NASA. and as a senior scientist at the
NASA Astrobiology Institute. From 2008 - 2012 she was the project scientist of NASA's O/OREOS satellite. Pascale Ehrenfreund has written over 300 scientific research papers, holds an H-index of 70 and published 12 books. From 2015-2020, she was the first woman to lead the
German Aerospace Center () (DLR). The
main-belt asteroid,
9826 Ehrenfreund was named in her honor. ==Awards==