Origins of Life: The Earth, the Solar System, and Beyond

Speakers' Biographies

Donna G. Blackmond


"Physical and Chemical Models for the Origin of Biological Homochirality"

Donna G. Blackmond is a professor of chemical engineering and chemical technology and the chair in catalysis at Imperial College London. She received her PhD in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1984. She has also taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Hull and been an associate director at Merck & Co., Inc., where she was responsible for establishing a new laboratory for research and development in the kinetics and catalysis of complex organic reactions. Blackmond has also led a research group at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. Among her honors are a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the Organic Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society, a Robert Burns Woodward Visiting Professorship at Harvard University, the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Award in Process Technology, the North American Catalysis Society’s Paul H. Emmett Award, the Organic Reactions Catalysis Society’s Raul Rylander Award, and the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation.

David Catling


"Evolution of Atmospheres on Habitable Planets"

David Catling is a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, with joint appointments in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and the cross-campus Astrobiology Program, and holds the European Union Marie Curie Chair in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. His research interests include the coupled evolution of planetary surfaces and atmospheres and involvement in exploration of Mars. From 1995 to 2001, Catling was a researcher at the NASA Ames Research Center in California. He earned his doctoral degree in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Planetary Physics at the University of Oxford in 1994.

Barbara J. Grosz


Barbara J. Grosz is the interim dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Before becoming interim dean of the Institute, she served as its dean of science, designing and building its science program. Grosz has been a member of the Harvard faculty since 1986. Her research in computer science, focused on finding ways to make computers behave more intelligently, draws also on work in linguistics, psychology, economics and philosophy. Grosz has led several Harvard efforts aimed at increasing the participation of women in science. Grosz is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1993, she became the first woman president of the AAAI. She serves on the executive committee and is a former trustee of the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence.

Gerald F. Joyce


"Directed, Continuous, and Self-Sustained Evolution of RNA Enzymes"

Gerald F. Joyce is dean of the faculty and a professor in the departments of chemistry and molecular biology at the Scripps Research Institute. Joyce’s research involves the test-tube evolution of nucleic acids and the application of these methods to the development of novel RNA and DNA enzymes. He also has a longstanding interest in the origins of life and the role of RNA in the early history of life on Earth. Joyce received his BA from the University of Chicago and both an MD and PhD from the University of California at San Diego. He received postgraduate medical training at Mercy Hospital in San Diego and postdoctoral research training at the Salk Institute before joining the faculty of the Scripps Research Institute. He was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2001, and, in 2005, received the Urey Medal, presented every six years by the ISSOL—The International Astrobiology Society.

Scott M. McLennan


"The Sedimentary Cycle of Mars and Its Astrobiological Implications"

Scott M. McLennan is a professor at Stony Brook University. He conducts research on the geochemistry of sedimentary rocks using a variety of analytical and experimental approaches. His research is directed toward gaining a better understanding of the composition and evolution of planetary crusts, plate tectonic associations of ancient sedimentary sequences, ancient climates, and trace element behavior during weathering and diagenesis. Since 1998, he has employed experimental studies and geochemical data returned from Mars to understanding sedimentary processes that have operated on that planet during its history. McLellan earned his PhD from the Australian National University. He is a member of the science teams of the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover mission and the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission and has published more than 130 papers in the fields of geochemistry, planetary science, and sedimentology.

Ann Pearson


Ann Pearson is the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She uses analytical chemistry, isotopic geochemistry, and molecular biology to approach questions of evolutionary heritage and contemporary function. The “how, when, and why” of microbes yield insight into environmental conditions on Earth today, in the past, and potentially in our future. Recent research has focused mainly on understanding the origins of important environmental and taxonomic lipid molecular fossils. The presence of lipids in modern and ancient organic matter reflects the resistance of complex hydrocarbons to both biotic and abiotic degradation, making this class of compounds excellent “biomarkers.” Pearson earned her PhD in chemical oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Oceanography, where she also earned the C. G. Rossby Award for Best Dissertation in the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate. In 2004, she received a fellowship for science and engineering from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.

Dimitar D. Sasselov


Dimitar D. Sasselov is a professor of astronomy and director of the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard University. He joined the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as a postdoctoral fellow and was head tutor of the Department of Astronomy. Sasselov was educated at Sofia University in Bulgaria, where he earned his PhD in physics in 1988. He earned his PhD in astronomy from the University of Toronto 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 particularly interested in unstable stars—ones 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 with novel techniques that he hopes to use to find planets similar to Earth.

Martin Schoonen


"Minerals, Radicals, Prebiotic Chemistry, and the Emergence of Oxygenic Photosynthesis"

Martin Schoonen is a professor at Stony Brook University and the interim dean of Stony Brook Southampton, a new Stony Brook campus devoted to environmental issues, ecology, and sustainability. His research group at the Aqueous Geochemistry Lab, part of the Center for Environmental Molecular Science at Stony Brook and the Penn State Astrobiology Research Center, investigates mineral catalysis and mineral surface reactivity. Schoonen completed his PhD in geochemistry and minerology at Penn State.

Sara Seager


"Extrasolar Planets and the Search for Habitable Worlds"

Sara Seager is the Ellen Swallow Richards Associate Professor of Planetary Science and associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Seager focuses on theoretical models of atmospheres and interiors of all kinds of exoplanets and has introduced many new ideas to the field of exoplanet characterization, including work that led to the first detection of an exoplanet atmosphere. She was part of a team that codiscovered the first detection of light emitted from an exoplanet and the first spectrum of an exoplanet. Before joining MIT, she was on the senior research staff at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a long-term member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She was the recipient of the American Astronomical Society’s Helen B. Warner Prize in 2007.

Lucy M. Ziurys


"Prebiotic Chemistry in Space: Setting the Stage for the Evolution of Life"

Lucy M. Ziurys is a professor of chemistry and astronomy at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She is currently director of the Arizona Radio Observatory and leads the Astrochemistry Group of the Laplace Center for Astrobiology of Arizona. She has also taught at Arizona State University in Tempe. Ziurys’s field of research focuses on the study of chemistry of interstellar molecules through astronomical observations and laboratory spectroscopy. Her group has built several laboratory spectrometers, which have been successfully used to measure the spectra of potential interstellar molecules. They have identified numerous chemical compounds in space, including organic species and phosphorus-bearing molecules that have biological implications. Ziurys received her BS from Rice University, majoring in physics and chemistry, and spent two years at the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie in Bonn, Germany, as a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Fellow before receiving her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

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