Unexpected Pairings Week 1: Origins

Looking back to see forward, Penn State Eberly scientists are working on multiple fronts and across varied disciplines, from the molecular to the cosmic scale, harnessing high-powered technologies to better understand how our world and life in the universe came to be—because understanding our origins is key to building a better future. Read more about Eberly research on the origins of life in the universe.

January 24, 2026
001 Chemical and Biomedical Engineering Building
11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

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"From distant stars to living worlds: The path to habitable planets"

Presented by Suvrath Mahadevan, Verne M. Willaman Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics

The discovery of extrasolar planets enables us to tackle millennia old questions about whether the Earth and our solar system are unique, how they formed, and whether life exists beyond Earth. The 6000 exoplanets now known reveal many of the underlying mechanisms of how planets form and evolve, and the complex interplay between stars and planets that sculpt the atmospheres of planets and the architecture of planetary systems.

In this talk, Suvrath Mahadevan will discuss the techniques used to discover exoplanets, the challenges of detecting terrestrial planets like the Earth — those capable of hosting liquid water on their surface — and how the coolest most numerous stars in the galaxy are potentially attractive targets. New precision instruments developed at Penn State are now beginning to discover and characterize rocky planets around the coolest stars and discovering ways to mitigate the noise from the stars themselves that currently limit our ability to discover planets like our own around the nearest sun-like stars.

The talk will also discuss how these discoveries pave the way for NASA's next flagship mission, the Habitable World Observatory, which will be capable of observing these new worlds in reflected light, and analyzing this light to search for biosignatures in their atmosphere. The ability to answer the age-old question of whether life exists outside the solar system is now within our reach!

Speaker Bio:

Suvrath Mahadevan, Verne M. Willaman Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, focuses his research on developing novel instruments and techniques to discover and understand exoplanets, or planets outside of our solar system. These new instruments—advanced ultra-stable spectrometers—can detect the periodic miniscule changes in the wavelength of light emitted by a star, which is the signpost of the gravitational tug of a planet as it orbits its parent star. Mahadevan and his team designed and built the Habitable-Zone Planet Finder at Penn State, a near-infrared spectrograph attached to the 10m Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas that can detect exoplanets around the coolest known stars. He also leads the team for NEID, a visible light spectrometer also designed and built at Penn State that is installed on the 3.5-meter optical WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) in Southern Arizona. Prior to joining Penn State in 2009, Mahadevan was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Florida from 2007 to 2009. He earned a doctoral degree in astrophysics from the University of Florida in 2006 and a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, India, in 2000.

"Understanding our aquatic ancestors: fish, fossils, and the water-to-land transition"

Presented by Tom Stewart, assistant professor of biology

In this talk, Stewart will discuss how his laboratory investigates one of the most transformative events in the history of life: the water-to-land transition of vertebrates. This transition set the stage for the rise of tetrapods, the group of animals that includes amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. In the first part of the talk, Stewart will focus on the fossils of Tiktaalik roseae and its close relatives. Through paleontological expeditions to Arctic Canada, museum-based research, and high-resolution 3D reconstructions, his lab uses these fossils to reveal the anatomy, movement, and behavior of animals that were evolving to live at the water’s edge and transitioning from swimming to walking. These discoveries illuminate how the skeleton was reconfigured as fins evolved into limbs and how our own ancestors first adapted to life on land roughly 375 million years ago. 

The second part of the talk highlights how living fishes offer insights that fossils alone cannot. By studying behaviors—from blinking in mudskippers to the foraging habits of juvenile cichlids—his group investigates how behavior shapes development and drives evolutionary innovation. This work shows that behaviors like blinking, which now seem mundane, were once pivotal adaptations that made terrestrial life possible. Together, fossils and living species provide a powerful, complementary perspective on how vertebrates first ventured onto land and the deep history of the human lineage. 

Speaker Bio:

Thomas Stewart is an assistant professor of biology at Penn State, where he leads a research program investigating the evolution, development, and biomechanics of vertebrate skeletal systems. He earned a bachelor’s degree in biology at Syracuse University in 2009 and a doctoral degree in integrative biology at the University of Chicago in 2015, followed by postdoctoral positions at Yale University and the University of Chicago. Stewart’s research integrates paleontology, evolutionary developmental biology, and functional morphology to understand how major innovations—such as fins, limbs, and blinking—arise and diversify. His work has appeared in journals including Nature, Nature Communications, and PNAS, and has been featured widely in international media. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the W.M. Keck Foundation, and other agencies, and he is an active contributor to scientific outreach and professional service. His lab website is: https://tomstewartscience.org/