Institute Colloquium

Prof. Dimitar Sasselov

On Life's Origins: a View from Astrophysics

September 26, 2024

Start: 10:00 am

Conference Room at Leibniz IPHT

Contact persons at Leibniz IPHT: Corinna Kufner

Dimitar Sasselov studies stars and planets at Harvard University, where he is the Phillips Professor of Astronomy, and founding director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative. His research explores modes of interaction between light and matter – from the emergence of the cosmic microwave background in the early universe to laboratory experiments in photochemistry for life’s origins on Earth. More than 20 years ago, he and his team discovered several planets orbiting other stars with novel techniques he later put to work as a co-investigator on NASA’s Kepler and TESS missions to find planets like Earth. His book “The Life of Super-Earths” (Basic Books, 2012) describes the renewed search for life on other planets.
In 1988 Dimitar Sasselov acquired his PhD in Physics from Sofia University (Bulgaria), followed by his PhD in Astronomy from the University of Toronto in 1990. In 1999 Sasselov became an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He has numerous awards (two NASA Achievement awards, doctor honoris causa (Sofia Univ.), Oxford’s Astor Lectureship, etc.) and has lectured at DLD, TED, and Davos.
Professor Sasselov is the founding director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, a cross-disciplinary research effort bridging the physical and life sciences. He is the founding co-director of the Simons Collaboration on the Origins of Life, and in 2023 he helped create the international Origins Federation, whose board he now chairs. He was a Senior Science Advisor for the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and a member of the Global Agenda Council on space security at the World Economic Forum.

The lecture will be given in English.