Betül Kacar (born 1983) is a Turkish-American astrobiologist and an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin. She directs a NASA Astrobiology Research Center exploring the essential attributes of life, its origins and how they should shape our notions of habitability and the search for life on other worlds.
Kacar was born in Istanbul. She was the first woman in her family to receive formal education. She studied chemistry at Marmara University. She received Howard Hughes Medical Institute undergraduate fellowship to spend a summer conducting scientific research in Emory University studying organic chemistry. She returned to Emory University in 2004, and eventually earned a PhD in Biomolecular Chemistry in 2010 in enzyme structure-function relationship. Kacar transitioned to study origins of life after Ph.D. She was appointed as a NASA postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010. She was awarded a NASA scholarship in 2011, followed by funding from the NASA Astrobiology Institute and Exobiology Branch in 2013. She joined Harvard University in 2014, where she led an independent research group as a fellow in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. In 2015, she received the Templeton Fellowship and became a member of the Harvard Origins Initiative. Kacar was named NASA Early Career Faculty Fellow in 2019. In 2020, she received the Scialog fellowship for her studies on life in the universe by the Research Corporation and Science Advancement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXU_M4030nEWe could kick-start life on another planet. Should we?
"Life makes our planet an incredibly exotic place compared to the rest of the known universe," says astrobiologist Betül Kaçar, whose research uses statistics and mathematical models to simulate ancient environments and gather insights into the origins of existence. In this fascinating talk, she explores how a deeper understanding of chemistry could lead to the "secret sauce" for sparking life on other planets -- and asks us to ponder an important question: If we could kick-start life in the universe, should we?
https://www.ted.com/talks/betul_kacar_w ... edcomshare
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