The Origins Institute in partnership with the McMaster Alumni Association is pleased to welcome to Hamilton Jonathan S Lindsey, PhD, from North Carolina State University to provide a free public lecture.

In his talk on photosynthesis and the origin of life, Dr. Lindsey will discuss photosynthesis as a vital step in the evolution of life that occurred very early in Earth’s evolutionary history. His own origins-related work in organic chemistry has been aimed at understanding how the porphyrin pigments underlying photosynthesis could originate at the time of the origin of life. We also study the genomes of cyanobacteria in order to understand how photosynthesis has continued to evolve in modern organisms, and we develop practical applications of porphyrins for capturing light in medicine (e.g. cancer detection).

Wednesday, May 1, 2019
7 p.m. – doors open & light refreshments
7:30 p.m. – lecture
McMaster Innovation Park, Room 1CD
175 Longwood Road South
Hamilton, ON

For more information and to register please visit http://alumni.mcmaster.ca/Origins2 or email ckenned@mcmaster.ca

More about Jonathan Lindsey:

Jonathan S Lindsey’s work involves studying the diversity of natural product synthesis in Cyanobacteria, and the synthetic chemistry of light-capturing molecules like chlorophylls. He is also designing new fluorophore molecules useful in clinical diagnosis of cancer. He received his B.S. Degree in Chemistry from Indiana University at Bloomington before earning his Ph.D. degree from The Rockefeller University in 1983. His doctoral work with Dr. David C. Mauzerall concerned the synthesis and characterization of a 3-dimensional molecular architecture for studies of light-driven electron-transfer reactions, as occur in the reaction center of photosynthetic bacteria. After continuing for one-year as a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller, he spent 12 years on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, and moved in 1996 to North Carolina State University as Glaxo Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry.