Henderson “Jim” Cleaves, professor and chair of the chemistry department at Howard University in Washington, D.C., will deliver the 2025 Henry J. and Linda C. Pownall Lecture in Chemistry at Wilkes University at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 9, in Stark Learning Center 105. The lecture, “Understanding the Chemical Origins of Life,” is free and open to the public.
How life began on Earth, and whether it is likely widespread in the universe, are two of science’s greatest unanswered questions. The former question became formalized in the early 20th century, and has undergone numerous revisions since. The history and current state of this question, and its implications for the likelihood of life beyond Earth, will be reviewed in this lecture. The presentation will run approximately 50 minutes with a 10-minute Q&A session to follow.
Cleaves earned his bachelor’s degree at UC Santa Cruz and his doctorate at UC San Diego. After NASA postdoctoral fellowships at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, he was a professor at the Earth-Life Science Institute at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He moved to Howard University in 2023 and served as the youngest president of the International Society for the Study of the Origins of Life for an unprecedented three terms. Cleaves’ lab research focuses on prebiotic chemistry, life-detection technologies, self-assembly processes and chemoinformatics.
The Pownall Lecture in Chemistry was established thanks to Henry J. and Linda C. Pownall. Henry Pownall, PhD, graduated from Wilkes College in 1967 with a master’s degree in chemistry. He earned his doctorate from Northeastern University in physical chemistry with postdoctoral fellowships in molecular spectroscopy at the University of Houston and biochemistry at Baylor College of Medicine with an emphasis on lipid metabolism.
For more information, visit wilkes.edu/pownall.
