As a child, Zita Martins studied classical ballet from the age of four and was encouraged by her teacher to progress to the National Ballet School in Portugal, which would have put her on track to become a professional dancer. Instead, at the age of 15, she decided she wanted to pursue science, gave up ballet and taught herself Russian. At secondary school, she filled in a careers test, which advised her strengths were in science and art, which Zita Martins says was not very helpful. As an undergraduate studying chemistry, at
Instituto Superior Técnico, Martins was unsure how to direct her education towards a career in space science. She says, "I emailed NASA and asked them what I should do. They told me to do an internship in the Netherlands. I did an internship there, and did a really cool project analysing samples from space (i.e. meteorites). I thought: ‘this is cool; I want to do this for the rest of my life’. She was awarded a
PhD in 2007 for Chemical analysis of organic molecules in
carbonaceous meteorites from
Leiden University supervised by
Pascale Ehrenfreund. While completing her PhD, she gave a talk which was led to an invitation to be an Invited Scientist at
NASA. == Research and career==