2025 LIFE RCN Seminar Episode 8: Dr. Sara Imari Walker and Dr. L. Felipe Benites

Dr. Sara Imari Walker is Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Professor at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University (ASU) and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.

Sara Imari Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist whose research focuses on new approaches to the origins of life, artificial life, and the detection of alien life on other worlds. She is the author of Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence (Riverhead, 2024), which argues for a radical new thinking around what constitutes life. Walker is Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Professor at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University (ASU) and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research has made major contributions to science through co-development of assembly theory, advancing detection of alien life and efforts to make life de novo in the lab. Her academic honors include a Stanley Miller Early Career Award from the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life in 2021 and a Science Polymath Fellowship from Schmidt Sciences in 2023. In addition to her work in astrobiology, Walker has collaborated on several interdisciplinary projects with artists and philosophers, combining scientific rigor with speculative thinking to explore questions about the nature of life in the universe.

Her talk is entitled “Quantitative Prebiotic Chemistry and Defining the Abiotic Baseline Reveals why RNA may be unique to Earth”.

Dr. L. Felipe Benites is a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University.

He investigates the fundamental principles that constrain biological diversity across cellular and viral life. His work sits at the intersection of astrobiology, evolution, and genomics, where he explores how life might differ under alternative chemical, evolutionary and planetary conditions.

His talk is entitled "Deep-time evolution of proteome elemental composition in viruses and cells".

The meeting room can be found here.