Survey of Artificial Chemistry Models and the Origin of Life
About
A survey of recent ideas about the origin of life, including the RNA-world, metabolism first, and lipid world hypotheses, as well as the ideas of autocatalysis that underly some of these. I present exploratory work on variants of these hypotheses and formalizing some of these ideas with artificial chemistry models.
Details
- Date:
- Friday, October 23, 2026
- Time:
- 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
- Location:
- CDS 950
- Theme:
- Biology, Computational Methodology
Speaker
Gavin Rees
Gavin Rees is a PhD student in Boston University’s Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences whose work combines mathematics and evolutionary biology. His research focuses on social behavior and combines approaches from theoretical biology, statistics, and evolutionary game theory to understand ecological and evolutionary dynamics of intertwined systems. His primary focus is on biological complexity, and he has worked in evolution of cooperation in many-player social dilemmas, as well as inferring social dynamics in political bodies. Prior to his doctoral studies, Gavin earned his Bachelor’s in Mathematics from Harvard University with a secondary in Computer Science, and worked as a software engineer at Markforged, and as research assistant at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria and the Complexity Science Hub, Vienna.