How can understanding the origins of life on Earth inform our search for interplanetary life? Andrew Knoll, Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University, has researched this question on an interdisciplinary level, and his answers have changed the way geologists view the environment and the way biologists view early life.
Dr. Knoll is a paleontologist, sedimentary geologist, geochemist, evolutionary biologist, and astrobiologist, holding positions in both the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the Department of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology. His work focuses in part on the first four billion years of Earth's history, Archean and Proterozoic paleontology, and biogeochemistry. Specializing in the early evolution of life in the Proterozoic (544-2500 million years ago), he is arguably the foremost scholar on microfossils and the use of stable isotope chemistry to learn more about the age and environments in which the earliest forms of life lived. Extraordinary even amongst scientists of his own field, Knoll's research has contributed to an understanding of how organisms and the geochemical environment affect each other synergistically; to the diversification of plant life; to knowledge of how the earliest organisms diversified both in response to ocean and atmospheric chemistry; and to the metabolic processes through which these organisms have influenced the geochemistry from early times to the present.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
7:30 PM - 8:30 PM
Rawles Hall 100
—Indermohan Virk
ivirk@indiana.edu
812.855.5788
