Is There a Law of Chemistry That Pushes It Towards Biology?

This lecture was given at Baylor University on September 13, 2022. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website: www.thomisticinstitute.org About the speaker: Karin Öberg is Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University. Her specialty is astrochemistry and her research aims to uncover how chemical processes affect the outcome of planet formation, especially the chemical habitability of nascent planets. Dr. Öberg obtained her B.Sc. in chemistry at Caltech in 2005, and her Ph.D. in astronomy, with a thesis focused on laboratory astrochemistry, from Leiden University in 2009. She did postdoctoral work at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as a NASA Hubble fellow, focusing on millimeter observations of planet-forming disks around young stars. In 2013 she joined the Harvard astronomy faculty as an assistant professor. She was promoted and named the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor in Astronomy in 2016, and promoted to full professor with tenure in 2017. Dr. Öberg’s research in astrochemistry has been recognized with a Sloan fellowship, a Packard fellowship, the Newton Lacy Pierce Award from the American Astronomical Society, and a Simons fellowship. Her recent TED talk explaining some of her research can be found here: https://www.ted.com/talks/karin_oberg_the_galactic_recipe_for_a_living_planet