Dr. Robert M. Hazen will deliver the next Dialogues of Discovery lecture at Janelia. Hazen’s talk, “Chance, Necessity, and the Origins of Life,” is on Wednesday, March 6 at 7:00 p.m. All Dialogues of Discovery lectures are free and open to the public, but tickets are required for admission.
About the Talk
Earth’s 4.5 billion year history is a complex tale of physical and chemical processes, as well as "frozen accidents." This history is preserved in mineral species, and can be explored in new approaches called "mineral evolution" and "mineral ecology." In this lecture, Hazen will discuss how Earth’s changing mineralogy reflects the co-evolving geosphere and biosphere in surprising ways that touch on life's origins.
About Robert Hazen
Hazen is Senior Staff Scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory and Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Sciences at George Mason University. He received a bachelor of science and master of science in geology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a PhD at Harvard University in Earth science. He was a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at Cambridge University.
Hazen’s recent research in part examines the role of minerals in life’s origins, with a focus on mineral-catalyzed organic synthesis and interactions between biomolecules and mineral surfaces. Since 2008 Hazen and his colleagues have explored “mineral evolution” and “mineral ecology”—new approaches that exploit large and growing mineral data resources to explore the co-evolution of the geo- and biospheres.