2026 LIFE RCN Seminar Series: Dr. Ilya Bobrovskiy and Dr. Tharika Liyanage

On January 6th, 8AM Pacific/11AM Eastern, the LIFE RCN is excited to welcome Dr. Ilya Bobrovskiy and Dr. Tharika Liyanage.

Dr. Ilya Bobrovskiy leads a research group at MARUM that seeks to deconvolve the early record of eukaryotic evolution using organic geochemistry. Ilya received his Ph.D. from the Australian National University, where he established the cutting-edge techniques for extracting and quantifying biomarkers from ancient animal fossils. Since then, he has held positions at Caltech and GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences before starting his own group in Bremen.

The title of Dr. Bobrovskiy's talk: "Unmixing ancient biomarker signals to recover primary ecosystem composition".

Dr. Tharika Liyanage is a geobiologist focusing on the missing links between the evolution of microbial life and their fossilized lipid biomolecules in the geological record. Her research works towards making our reconstructions of microbial ecosystems and environments in Earth’s early biosphere more robust. She is currently an Agouron Geobiology Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University and earned her Ph. D. at the Australian National University.

The title of Dr. Liyanage’s talk: "Finding families for orphan biomarkers".

The meeting link can be found here.