Dr. Kempes is an expert in general ecological theories, and has published widely on general theories of life for organisms ranging from bacteria to vascular plants. He has worked to scale up organism physiology to continental scales and to develop detailed agnostic life detection methods. He has also published on general statistical frameworks for life detection. He is the theory lead for the Laboratory of Agnostic Biosignatures and the PI of the NSF RCN for Exploration of Life’s Origins. For VPL, Dr. Kempes performs ecological modeling to scale up metabolic models to global scale and will provide expertise in general physiological theories of life, general ecological theories, and statistical methods for life detection.