Research Themes

Our understanding of the transition from chemistry to biochemistry of life has seen significant progress over the last two decades, and sits at the edge of a major breakthrough. We now understand how atmospherically-sourced hydrogen cyanide and sulfidic anions could react to furnish the building blocks of nucleic acids, peptides and lipids: all central to life on Earth. This chemistry requires a sequence of different conditions, including dry state heating, aqueous solution and ultraviolet irradiation. A crucial goal of this work is to refine the building block syntheses and connect the chemistry to planetary environments where it can take place.

Traces of prebiotic chemistry from Earth’s young surface have been largely erased by plate tectonics. Nevertheless, we now understand that the Earth has always operated as a single complex system driven by the interactions between energy, matter, and organisms. We can therefore be certain that prebiotic chemical pathways would have co-evolved with environmental conditions through Earth’s early history. 

In that respect, ongoing Mars exploration is a milestone event for obtaining insights on Earth's early history. To that end, our program will focus on understanding: the diversity of prebiotic planetary environments, including their connections to planetary interiors, to global climate, and to each other; the dynamics of planetary environments, and how a planet’s physical and chemical evolution shapes local prebiotic environments and their global distribution with time; and how biological processes regulate planetary environments to maintain their habitability and lead to their remote detectability. 

The discovery of exoplanets, placing our Solar System as one amongst countless planetary systems, opened a Pandora’s box of questions about the uniqueness of the Solar System and the prospect of life on extrasolar worlds. A prerequisite to explore the origin of life in the Universe is establishing a coherent model to test the habitability of exoplanets across their vast diversity of system configurations, ages, compositions, and climates. This is especially true for temperate planets orbiting close to small and cooler stars (M dwarfs), which are ubiquitous but experience very different surface irradiation. For this purpose we need to gain deeper insights about the internal structure, atmosphere and geochemical conditions on these exoplanets. 

Our work will focus on: the development and implementation of ground-based high-precision Doppler surveys to discover nearby habitable-zone planets conducive for life, high-precision atmospheric remote sensing of habitable-zone exoplanets, the development of dedicated space mission to enable detections of biosignatures in Earth-like exoplanets, and development of robust modeling and theoretical frameworks to relate the atmospheric and surface properties observable on exoplanet systems at various stages with the underlying geochemical and biotic/prebiotic processes.