Finding Life in the Universe by Dr Sarah Rugheimer

This planet we call home is teeming with life from the very depths of the ocean where no light penetrates, to small brine layers between ice crystals and near-boiling iridescent waters of Yellowstone. As we discover the vast diversity of extremophile life on Earth, our minds can only begin to imagine the possibilities for life to exist on other planets in the Universe. In this talk, Dr Sarah Rugheimer will present how we are going to characterize terrestrial planet atmospheres orbiting other stars and hopefully find life on another planet.

Dr Sarah Rugheimer is an astrophysicist working on how to detect life on an exoplanet by looking for atmospheric biosignatures. She earned her bachelor’s degree in physics at the University of Calgary, and her MA and PhD at Harvard in Astrophysics. She moved to the UK in 2015 to take the Simons Origins of Life Research Fellowship to St Andrews and is now at Oxford University with a Glasstone Research Fellowship and Hugh Price Fellowship at Jesus College. Sarah is an advocate for Women in STEM, hosting a resource page as well as mentoring students and co-hosting a podcast called “Self-care with Drs. Sarah” aimed at junior scientists navigating academia. She is also involved with outreach and has been on NPR and BBC discussing her work on modeling the atmosphere and climate of extrasolar planets. Her other passions include dance and high-altitude mountaineering.