Sara Walker

Professor Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, with research interests in the origins of life, artificial life, life and detection on other worlds. Since joining Arizona State Uiversity (ASU) in 2013 she has built a highly interdisciplinary research program to tackle the origin of life problem from all sides. She has mentored dozens of early career scientists and leads one of the largest theory groups in origins of life and astrobiology internationally. Her team's major contributions are in theoretical advances in the field of astrobiology, developing new approaches to the problem of understanding universal features of life that might allow a general theory for solving the matter to life transition, detecting alien life and designing synthetic life. At ASY, she is Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and Associate Director of the ASU-Santa Fe Institute Center for Biosocial Complex Systems. She is an Associate Professor with joint appointments in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and in the School of Complex Adaptive Systems. She is also a member of the External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.

She is PI of a NASA Indisciplinary Consortia for Astrobiology Research (iCAR) project focused on "Planetary Systems Biochemistry" which is providing a new set of rigorous, agnostic tools for NASA and other agencies to identify signs of life. She is playing a key role in developing statistical frameworks for life detection and new approaches to the origins of life, and was awarded the Stanley Miller Early Career Award by the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life in 2021 for her international leadership in these areas. She recognizes how understanding life at a deep level should have major technological and societal implications and therefore contributes to tech transfer of her labs work. In this direction, Walker is part of a team awarded four highly competitive prizes from the National Institutes of Health to build a pipeline from prediction to design, discovery and validation of new, non-addictive opioid drugs. She serves on several steering committees and Boards, including the Sloan Foundation’s Matter-to-Life Initiative, the LIFE mission concept, the NASA Network for Life Detection, and the NSF Origins of Life Coordination Network among others. She is also heavily invested in public engagement in science, and has reached thousands in-person, and hundreds of thousands remotely through lectures, podcast interviews and other activities.