Lynn Justine Rothschild FLS (born May 11, 1957) is an evolutionary biologist and astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center,^[2][3] and was a consulting Professor at Stanford University, where she taught Astrobiology and Space Exploration. She is an adjunct professor at Brown University. At Ames, her research has focused on how life, particularly microbes, has evolved in the context of the physical environment, both on Earth and potentially beyond our planet's boundaries. Since 2007 she has studied the effect of UV radiation on DNA synthesis, carbon metabolism and mutation/DNA repair in the Rift Valley of Kenya and the Bolivian Andes, and also in high altitude experiments atop Mount Everest, in balloon payloads with BioLaunch. She was the principal investigator of the first free-flyer synthetic biology payload which flew on the DLR EuCROPIS mission.

Rothschild appeared on the 5th episode of the Youtube Original "The Age of A.I." in the episode called "How A.I. is searching for Aliens", released on January 15, 2020. She is credited as "Evolutionary and Synthetic Biology, NASA".^[4]