The next RED School will be March 14-20, 2027
Discover the school program and apply
Here’s the team of teachers in charge of this year’s courses, with whom you’ll have the opportunity to interact
Ancient rocks, Traces of Life, Experimental Fossilization
Sylvain Bernard has held a permanent research position at CNRS since 2010, first at LMCM and, following its 2014 merger, at IMPMC, where he has been serving as deputy director of the lab since 2023. With the ultimate goal of properly decoding the ancient fossil record, his research sits at the crossroads of petrology, organic geochemistry, nanopaleontology, and cosmochemistry. To understand how (bio)geochemical signals might be preserved (and identified) in ancient rocks, he combines laboratory experiments with the in situ spectromicroscopic characterization of natural samples. He is now extending his work to Earth’s oldest sedimentary rocks, at Isua in Greenland, while continuing his long-standing involvement in Mars exploration as a member of the SuperCam team.