14 July
7PM BST

Join us for the fifth episode in our new online event series, super/science.
Buy tickets here.

During this event, we will hear from Dr Patricia Sanchez-Baracaldo about Cyanobacteria and the formation of a habitable world.

Oxygen is essential for complex life forms as it is used during aerobic respiration. During the early Earth there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, and the oxygen we enjoy today has accumulated as the result of biological activity. Blue-green algae, otherwise known as Cyanobacteria, were the first organisms that worked out how to perform photosynthesis - it is during this biological process that oxygen is released into the atmosphere. During this session, we will explore when Cyanobacteria evolved, how Cyanobacteria contributed to making our planet habitable, and why it took so long for complex life to appear in our planet.

Patricia Sanchez-Baracaldo is currently a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Reader in Microbiology at Bristol University. She did her PhD in plant evolutionary biology in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. As a postdoctoral researcher, Patricia worked on the molecular ecology of Cyanobacteria at Bristol University. She then had a career break of about five years to look after her young family and returned to science with a Daphne Jackson and Dorothy Hodgkin Royal Society Fellowships in 2011. In 2016, Patricia was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. Her research interests include photosynthesis, biogeochemical cycles, climate change, microbial comparative genomics, evolutionary biology.

This event will be accessed via Zoom. We will send you the meeting link about 15 minutes before the event in order to keep it as secure as possible. Please also check your spam folder.

Images: Dr Patricia Sanchez-Baracaldo