September 12-15, 2023
Harvard Campus
Cambridge, Massachusetts – USA

About Life in the Universe II
The scientific program of the meeting will deal with the topic of Life in the Universe. This is an incredibly important and timely topic, which was covered in a very successful first conference of the same name last year in Sofia, Bulgaria. Given its success and the very positive feedback to follow up with a second installment, we decided to organize the next one in the Boston area, with the active involvement of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative as a local host. The conference will also be the inaugural meeting of the newly formed Origins Federation, founded by four partner institutions to promote research on the topic of origin and prevalence of life in the Universe. We will dig deeper into topics connecting different fields. Ever since the dawn of human civilization, the problem of defining life and searching for its occurrence has been of great interest. One might even argue that along with the emergence of intelligence and consciousness, the understanding of life itself is one of the premier scientific issues of our time. Over the past decades, there have been major achievements in astronomy, such as the discovery of exoplanets in amazing abundance; chemistry, such as the development of synthetic networks with overlap to geochemical processes; quantitative biology, such as our ability to increasingly understand in detail the workings of processes underlying living systems; and the studies of geochemistry and the fossil record of the early Earth. These achievements, if brought together, offer the possibility of yielding major breakthroughs for the aforementioned scientific questions.

To facilitate such a fruitful transdisciplinary interaction, we plan to invite leading experts, early career researchers, and especially graduate students from the relevant research areas and discover opportunities for cross-fertilization between subfields.

The workshop will have 5 sessions:

• Primers [Review lectures to facilitate transdisciplinary interaction]
• Exoplanets & Planet Formation
• Planetary environments & Life’s Emergence
• Origins Chemistry
• Synthetic Biology, Synthetic Cells & Theory

Life in the Universe Advisory Board
Dimitar Sasselov, Harvard University, co-Chair
Herbert Levine, Northeastern University, co-Chair
Kate Adamala, University of Minnesota
Karin Oberg, Harvard University
Ann Pearson, Harvard University
Didier Queloz, ETH-Zurich & Cambridge, UK
Jack Szostak, University of Chicago
Nicholas Tosca, Cambridge, UK

Conference funded by the National Science Foundation (Physics of Living System program at Northeastern University), Harvard University (Origins of Life Initiative and the Origins Federation) and The Kavli Foundation.

US Coordinator: Sara Bradley email

LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE | SOFIA, BULGARIA 2022