Photo by by Harold Dorwin

Senior advisor to the science program, Academic Ventures at the Radcliffe Institute, professor of astronomy in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative

Dimitar D. Sasselov is a senior science advisor to the science program at the Radcliffe Institute and has been a professor at Harvard University since 1998. He arrived at the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in 1990 as a Harvard-Smithsonian Center postdoctoral fellow. Between 1999 and 2003, he was the head tutor of the Department of Astronomy. Sasselov was born in Bulgaria and educated at Sofia University, where he received his PhD in physics in 1988, while concurrently working on his degree at the University of Toronto in Canada, where he received his PhD in astronomy in 1990.

His research explores the many modes of interaction between radiation and matter: from the evolution of hydrogen and helium in the early universe to the study of the structure of stars. He is very fond of unstable stars: stars that pulsate regularly and allow us to determine distances to other galaxies. Most recently his research has led him to explore the nature of planets orbiting other stars. He has discovered a few such planets using novel techniques that he hopes to use to find planets like Earth.

He is the director of the new Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, a multidisciplinary center that brings together physical and life scientists with the goal of studying the transition from chemistry to life and its place in the context of the universe.