GSI Seminar - Daniel Duzdevich: The origin of life and evolution, and a deep biological perspective on planetary crises

The origin of life is one of the biggest unanswered questions in science. It roots and unifies biology and is essential to the development of an experimental astrobiology. We need at least one model laboratory system that reasonably mimics the emergence of life-like phenomena on the early Earth before we can rigorously hypothesize about the prevalence of life throughout the universe. Daniel will present recent experimental results with RNA that are helping us think about how evolutionary processes may have first emerged. This lecture and discussion will also be an opportunity to consider how fundamental research informs our perspective on human-driven ecological and climate crises.

Daniel Duzdevich is a molecular biologist studying astrobiology and the origin of life. His graduate research at the University of Cambridge and Columbia University used single-molecule techniques to probe nucleic acid dynamics. He was a postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Jack W. Szostak at the Harvard University Origins of Life Initiative and has continued as a Szostak laboratory affiliate at the University of Chicago. His main interest is the emergence of evolutionary processes at the dawn of life. Daniel has been appointed a Marie Curie Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany for the 2023-24 academic year.

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