Dr. Aurore Hutzler is a geologist by training and received a Ph.D. in cosmochemistry from the Aix-Marseille University (France) in 2015. She then expanded her interests to topics related to curation of astromaterials, from handling to characterizing and especially to infrastructures needed for sample return missions. Her work at the Natural History Museum Vienna (Austria) crossed disciplines by combining architecture, cleanroom technology, contamination monitoring, planetary protection, and planetary science.

Dr. Hutzler more recently joined the Lunar and Planetary Institute (Houston, TX) as an Associate Scientist, to support the curation activities of the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) division at the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC). Her work at JSC aims at maintaining and developing curation facilities, from unrestricted (e.g., OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa2) and restricted sample returns. She develops in-house and commercial protocols for Contamination Control and Knowledge for existing curation facilities and in preparation for future challenges.