Research Expertise and Interest

origins of life, cosmology, star formation, planet formation

Research Description

Professor Beckwith is interested in nature's leap from chemistry to biology on the prebiotic Earth and how an understanding of that leap will let us infer the likelihood that life has developed elsewhere in the universe. He is investigating how non-equilibrium thermodynamic processes on a small scale may give rise to chemical reaction networks that will become self-sustaining and ultimately evolve into the life we see on Earth today.

Professor Beckwith is the Director of the Space Sciences Laboratory at Berkeley. He has served as Director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (Heidelberg, Germany), the Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (Baltimore, Maryland), and as the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies for the ten-campus University of California system (Oakland, California). He has been on the faculties of Cornell University (Professor of Astronomy) and Johns Hopkins University (Professor of Physics and Astronomy) prior to coming to Berkeley in 2008. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.