Prof. Betul Kacar received her Ph.D. from Emory University working jointly in the Department of Chemistry and the Emory School of Medicine. She was awarded a NASA Astrobiology Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2012 to bring abstractly reconstructed ancestral DNA sequences into the lab for physical, chemical, and biological characterization by expressing inferred DNA sequences in modern organisms. Between 2014 and 2017 she led an independent research project at Harvard University Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Department as a part of the Harvard Origins Initiative. In 2017, she joined the University of Arizona where she is focusing on reconstructing key enzymatic intermediates between biological activity and global geochemical reservoirs throughout the Earth’s deep history.

Dr. Kacar was named a NASA Early Career Faculty Fellow in 2019, and a Scialog Fellow for the Search for Life in the Universe in 2020 by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement and the Kavli Foundation. She was awarded grants from the John Templeton Foundation, the National Science Foundation, NASA Science Mission Directorate, NASA Exobiology, and Evolutionary Biology Programs, and the NASA Astrobiology Institute, as well as Harvard Origins Initiative and the University of Arizona, to continue this work deeper into the past. In 2020, she was selected as a principal investigator of one of the newly established NASA astrobiology research centers.

Dr. Kacar’s work has been recognized by various media outlets, such as the UN Women, UNICEF, European Union Delegation on Education, NOVA Science, BBC, NPR Science Friday, MIT Technology Review, Vice News, Wired, PBS, CNN, and others. In 2012 she co-founded SAGANet: The Online STEM Mentorship and Education Network, she serves on the Board of Advisory Committee of the MIT BioBuilder Foundation and was named “Way Cool Scientist” by the Science Club for Girls USA in 2016.

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