Sara Imari Walker

Santa Fe Institute, Arizona State University

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About

Sara Imari Walker is a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist whose work redefines how we search for life beyond Earth. Her research sits at the intersection of origin-of-life studies, complex systems, and information theory, with a particular focus on developing universal, quantitative frameworks to distinguish living from non-living chemical systems. In her highly cited 2020 paper, "Seeding Biochemistry on Other Worlds: Enceladus as a Case Study," she tackled the challenge of assessing the chemical space accessible to life in alien environments—a critical framework for upcoming robotic missions to ocean worlds. Walker also explores how biological principles like quorum sensing can inspire distributed computation in multi-robot systems (2021), and in her 2023 work, "A Universal Chemical Constructor," she outlines a bold hypothesis: that life emerges when a chemical system can store information about its environment. As a professor at Arizona State University and a leading voice in the field, Walker’s contributions are shaping a new, information-centric paradigm for astrobiology, with her most-cited papers already garnering significant attention in the community.