Joana C. Xavier is a bioengineer, computational biologist and Research Fellow based at the University College London, U.K., where she explores one of life’s deepest and oldest questions: how did cells first emerge on Earth?

Joana is profoundly interested in the origin of self-referentiality in biochemical networks and in exploring the tangled concepts of minimal cells, protocells and chassis cells. She has worked thoroughly with large computational models of metabolic networks of prokaryotes, the simplest known life-forms, to identify essential reactions and core metabolic modules.

As a young postdoctoral fellow, she has achieved what may be one of the most important research advances on the origins of life in the last decades.  Xavier led a group including Stuart Kauffman that showed in archaea and bacteria from more than two billion years ago the presence of reproducing autocatalytic sets of small molecules with no DNA, RNA or protein polymers. This raises the exciting possibility that molecular reproduction started five billion years ago with the emergence of small molecular autocatalytic systems everywhere in the universe.

Joana graduated as MSc from the first class of Bioengineers in the University of Porto (Portugal). She has done scientific research in laboratories in Portugal, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the Argonne National Laboratory (USA). She gained her PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Germany) and the University of Minho (Portugal).