Joana C. Xavier, MSc. Ph.D. is a bioengineer, computational biologist, author, explorer, and philosophy enthusiast. She asks life’s deepest and oldest question—how did cells first emerge on Earth?—among many others, which invariably orbit essential features of life.
Joana is currently based in Portugal and working independently. She has worked in Portugal, Germany, Hungary, U.S.A. and UK, volunteered in India and spent months in Canada, Japan and Brazil. Her network of friends and collaborators envelops our beautiful blue dot. She holds an MSc in Bioengineering with a specialization in Biotechnology (U. Porto, PT), and a PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering with a specialization in Systems Biology (U. Minho, PT and EMBL Heidelberg, DE).
Joana is interested in biosciences and bioengineering, AI for science, the simplest cells, all kinds of networks, nature, art, philosophy, literature, music, sustainable pescatarianism, diversity, equity and inclusion, altered states of consciousness, compassion, meditation.
Highlights
OoLEN
OoLEN is an international post-disciplinary network of early-career researchers exploring the origins of life. Check our website to connect with us.
Small-molecule autocatalytic networks are universal metabolic fossils
Xavier and Kauffman show that autocatalytic networks can describe the core metabolism of prokaryotes in both domains, Archaea and Bacteria.
The early origin of cooperation
The physical linkage of the first self-replicating molecules is likely to have been selected based on their capacity to perform cooperative catalysis.
