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Starting from a homogeneous blend of non-biochemistry related substances, we use light to start a Polymerization Induced Self-Assembly (PISA) reaction that triggers the boot-up of micron scale chemical systems. After forming, these grow, move, implode, self-reproduce and, for different types, compete for resources and show their “struggle for existence”.
Albertsen, A., Szymański, J. & Pérez-Mercader, J. Emergent Properties of Giant Vesicles Formed by a Polymerization-Induced Self-Assembly (PISA) Reaction. Sci Rep 7, 41534 (2017).

Principal Investigator

Image of Dr. Juan Pérez-Mercader

Juan Pérez-Mercader (jperezmercader@fas.harvard.edu) earned his Ph.D. from the City College of New York. He is an Elected Member of the International Academy of Astronautics and of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1998 in Association with the NASA Astrobiology Institute, he founded Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) of which he was its first Director. He is the architect of Spain’s current participation with infrastructure and instrumentation on board Mars Science Laboratory that arrived on Mars in August 2012. He is Profesor de Investigación in Spain’s National Research Council (CSIC) and an External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. In 2010, he joined Harvard as a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the university’s Origins of Life Initiative, where he leads a project on the “Top-down Synthesis of an Ex-novo Chemical Artificial Living System”.

Research Interests: Physics of Self-organizing Behavior, Information in Non-equilibrium Physico-chemical Systems, Chemical Computation, Origins of Life, Theoretical Biology and Life Detection.

Areas of Expertise: Quantum Field Theory, Dynamical Renormalization Group, Decoupling and Scaling Phenomena in Multiscale Systems, Information and Complexity in Chemical and Biological Systems, Micro-array Engineering, Communication Engineering, Astrobiology and Planetary Exploration

CV

Research Associates

Dr. Chenyu Lin

Chenyu Lin (chenyu_lin@fas.harvard.edu) earned his Bachelor’s degree in medicinal and applied chemistry from Kaohsiung Medical University and his Master’s degree in analytical chemistry from National Kaohsiung Normal University in Taiwan. He received his PhD in the field of supramolecular chemistry at Clarkson University, NY, where he primarily investigated self-assembled pi-pi interactions and their applications. He also investigated material science at Xerox Corporation as a visiting scientist. He joined Professor Pérez-Mercader’s group in February 2017, where he is working on PISA, vesicles and their applications.

Research Interests: Self-assembly Molecular Interactions and their applications, Block Copolymers, Origin of Life

Post-Doctoral Fellows

Dr. Parvej Khan

Parvej Khan was born and brought up in West Bengal, India. After completing a Master degree in Chemistry, he taught in a high school for around 5 years before starting his Ph.D. in July 2019 at Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. He earned his Ph.D. in November 2024 on Individual and Collective dynamics of spiral waves in BZ system motivated by cardiac wave dynamics. He joined the Pérez-Mercader group in April 2025.

Research Interests: Self Organization Phenomena, Nonlinear Dynamics, Chemical Computation.

Dr. Laura Ramírez Lázaro

Laura Ramírez Lázaro received her Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the University of Alcalá de Henares, Spain. She completed her PhD in Organic and Medicinal Chemistry at Trinity College Dublin in February 2025, where she developed functional fluorescent molecules based on naphthalimide scaffolds. Her work explored enzyme-responsive conjugates and their behavior in biological and material environments, integrating synthetic chemistry with photophysical and cellular studies for diagnostic and sensing applications. She joined Professor Pérez-Mercader’s group at Harvard University in August 2025 as a postdoctoral researcher.

Research Interests: Chemical Biology · Biomaging · Peptide Chemistry · Self-Assembly · Prebiotic Chemistry · Fluorescent Bioconjugates · Origin of life.

Associates

Dr. Anders Albertsen

Anders N. Albertsen studied Chemistry at the Department of Physics, Chemistry, and Pharmacy, University of Southern Denmark. He obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLinT) under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Pierre-Alain Monnard. The Ph.D. thesis, “Study of Replication Processes in Minimal Self-Replicating Systems”, was defended in December 2013. Anders joined the Pérez-Mercader group in February 2014.

Research Interests: Self-assembly, Vesicles, Micelles, Reverse Micelles, Nanoreactors, Reactivity of Membranes, Membrane Coupled Reactions, Encapsulated Reactions, Compartmentalization of Living Systems, the Origin of Life, and Synthetic Biology.

Dr. Sai Krishna Katla

Sai Krishna Katla earned his Ph.D. in Materials Science from Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), India in 2011. After graduating, he pursued postdoctoral research in Nanofabrication and Nanomaterials group at the Center for Advanced Microstructures and Devices (CAMD), Louisiana State University (LSU). Later, he worked as a Research Scientist from 2014 to 2015 in the 3D-Nanostructuring group at Institute of Physics & Institute of Micro- and Nanotechnologies (IMN), Technische Universität Ilmenau, Germany. Further, from 2015 to 2018 he worked as a Research Scientist – Associate and later as a Lecturer at The University of Texas at El Paso. Since Jan 2018, he is working on chemical computing and other problems associated with the creation of chemical artificial life in Pérez-Mercader group.

Research Interests: Lab-on-a-chip Systems, Nanomaterials, Self-assembly Processes, Chemical Computing, Origins of Life.

Dr. Alberto Perez-Munuzuri

Alberto P. Muñuzuri earned his undergraduate degree in the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain where he completed his PhD. During his PhD he worked in different laboratories, Prof. V.I. Krinsky (INLN-CNRS, Nice, France), Prof. M. Marcus (Max Plank Institut, Dortmund, Germany), Prof. E. Hofer (Univ. of Graz, Austria). Following this, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dept. at the Univ. of California at Berkeley (USA), group of Prof. L.O. Chua and later at the group of Prof. Epstein and Prof. Zhabotinsky at the Univ. of Brandeis (USA). He is a permanent professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain where he was the leader of the Group of Non Linear Physics for several years and has been collaborating with different scientific groups in Europe and America.

Research Interests: Spatio-temporal pattern formation in Complex Systems. Modelling biophysics. Autowaves, Turing structures, patterns in general. Hydrodynamic instabilities coupled with pattern-forming reactions. Decision making algorithms in robotics based in biological waves.

Dr. Kumar Siddharth

Kumar Siddharth earned his PhD in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from ‘The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’ under the supervision of Prof. Minhua Shao in September 2020. His research focus during PhD included electrocatalysis and mechanistic studies of several electrochemical reactions for fuel cell applications and he won the ‘Best Postgraduate award for Research Excellence’.

Research Interests: Electrochemistry, Electrocatalysis, Polymer Chemistry, Origins of Life, Material Chemistry

David Simakov holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. His PhD project was on design of catalytic membrane reactors for hydrogen generation and included both theoretical and experimental work. He worked for two years as a R&D Chemical Engineer in industry, developing a new generation of polymer membrane fuel cells. After that he spent almost two years as a postdoctoral research fellow participating in a joint project of the Technion and Princeton University, working on modeling of gene expression in development. His research interests cover a broad range of nonlinear reaction-transport phenomena in chemical and biological systems, and he is interested in both theoretical and experimental aspects.

Scientific Computing Specialist

Dr. Alec Pawling

Alec Pawling (apawling@fas.harvard.edu) earned a Bachelors of Science in computer science from Truman State University and a Masters of Science and Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from the University of Notre Dame. He studied streaming algorithms as a Masters student and stream mining and data warehousing as a Ph.D. student. He previously worked as a data manager and system administrator for a physics research group.

Professional Interests: Parallel Programming, Computer Vision, System Administration.

Administrative Coordinator

Jennifer Kennedy Scala

Jennifer Kennedy Scala (jscala@fas.harvard.edu).

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