PhD candidate and graduate research assistant Alex Deans-Rowe was presented with a William Emerson Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award at the 2025 El-Sayed Spring Research Symposium on May 8, 2025. Congratulations, Alex!
April 25, 2025. PI Loren Williams’s Faculty Support Coordinator, Research Admin Manager Keisha Durggin, along with Transuranic Chemistry Center of Research Excellence (TRU CoRE) PI Henry La Pierre and Research Scientist Julie Niklas, received a 2025 Georgia Tech Research Award for Outstanding Achievement in Research Program Development. This award is given annually to “a research team, preferably composed of both faculty and staff, that creates a new thought leadership platform to significantly expand Georgia Tech’s research and scholarship portfolio.” Congratulations, Keisha!
iCOOL Principal Investigator Loren Williams spoke on The Origins of Life on Earth and in the Universe at the University of Washington as part of a Spring 2025 Astrobiology Colloquium Series. The series is hosted by the University of Washington Astrobiology Program.
The Center for Integration of the Origins of Life (iCOOL) demonstrated “Chilling with Science: Cool Beyond Belief” at the kickoff of the 12th Atlanta Science Festival by the Georgia Tech community on March 8, 2025. iCOOL’s demonstration featured ultra COOL tricks with liquid N2 and solid CO2.
October 20, 2024. In life on modern Earth, enzymes made of protein catalyze the formation of most other types of biopolymers. These enzymes have been evolving for billions of years and have become very efficient at assembling nucleic acid, carbohydrate, and lipid biopolymers from their monomer parts. The enzymes are biopolymers themselves, which presents an intriguing challenge for origins researchers.
If biopolymers are required to make other biopolymers, how did the first biopolymers emerge? To address this question, PI Loren Williams, Collaborator Moran Frenkel-Pinter and student Rotem Edri of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have been reviewing the condensation-dehydration reactions that occur under oscillating water activity. These reactions are of interest because the enzymatic polymerization of monomers is a dehydration (or water producing) step.
In a new review in Accounts of Chemical Research, Edri and coauthors demonstrate how prebiotic catalysis by small molecules could have evolved and promoted chemical evolution, leading to increasing complexity and some of the core processes of contemporary biocatalysis. The role of water as a metabolite for promoting complexification over chemical evolution is highlighted.
November 1, 2024. PI Loren Williams, Co-I Eric Smith, and PhD student Vahab Rajaei participated in the Workshop on Information, Selection, and Evolution (WISE) at the Carnegie Science Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington, D.C., October 23-25, 2024. The purpose of the WISE is to convene expert and influential thinkers to share and discuss ideas, break disciplinary barriers, and further our understanding of the processes by which order arises.
