Rate My Professor Juan Perez-Mercader

Juan Perez-Mercader is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University and a member of the university's Origins of Life Initiative. He earned his undergraduate degree from the Universidad de Sevilla, an M.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics from Trinity College Dublin, and a Ph.D. from the City College of New York. Joining Spain's National Research Council (CSIC) in 1984 as Profesor de Investigación, a role he maintained until 2017, he founded the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) in 1998 in association with the NASA Astrobiology Institute, serving as its first director. Under his leadership, CAB developed contributions to NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity), including the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS), as well as infrastructure for the Perseverance rover and ESA's ExoMars mission. Since 2010, he has been External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.

At Harvard, Perez-Mercader leads the Pérez-Mercader Group, focusing on the top-down synthesis of ex-novo chemical artificial living systems. His research explores the physics of self-organizing behavior, information processing in non-equilibrium physico-chemical systems, chemical computation, origins of life, theoretical biology, and life detection. Using light to initiate polymerization-induced self-assembly reactions, his team creates micron-scale chemical systems from non-biochemical molecules that grow, move, self-reproduce, compete for resources, and exhibit evolutionary dynamics. Key publications include "Self-reproduction as an autonomous process of growth and division" (PNAS, 2025), "Dissipative Self-Assembly of Dynamic Multicompartmentalized Microsystems with Light-Responsive Behaviors" (Chem, 2020), "Emergent Properties of Giant Vesicles Formed by a Polymerization-Induced Self-Assembly (PISA) Reaction" (Scientific Reports, 2017), and over 150 additional papers across physics, astrobiology, and synthetic biology, along with five books. His contributions have been recognized with the Gravity Research Foundation Prize (1996), NASA Public Service Medals (2004 and 2013), a NASA Group Achievement Award, and election to the International Academy of Astronautics and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He holds nine patents in biotechnology, microfluidics, noisy electrochemistry, and chemical computing.