Dimitar Sasselov
Dimitar Sasselov is an astronomer and the founding director of Harvard’s Origins of Life Initiative, a new interdisciplinary institute that joins biologists, chemists, and astronomers in searching for the starting points of life on Earth and extrasolar planets. He is also a co-investigator on NASA’s Kepler mission, which is monitoring 100,000 stars in a hunt for exoplanets—a process that is described in his 2012 book The Life of Super-Earths: How the Hunt for Alien Worlds and Artificial Cells Will Revolutionize Life on Our Planet. Sasselov has a Ph.D. in physics from Sofia University and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Toronto. Previously he was a senior science advisor for the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a member of the Global Agenda Council on space security at the World Economic Forum.