Public Lecture
The Universe in Us
Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz
University of California Santa Cruz
Wed, Aug 7, 5:30–6:30pm
Where did the building blocks of life come from? The answer lies in the hearts of distant stars and incredibly powerful explosions such as supernovae, which help spread fundamental elements to galaxies far and wide where they can spark new life. The talk explores how hundreds of millions of celestial events have forged the elements that make up the Solar System, Earth, and us. Travel deep inside a giant star nearing the end of its life and witness the collision of stellar corpses. From the oxygen we breathe to the iron in our blood, the silicon in Earth’s mantle to the uranium that warms our planet’s core and helps give our planet its protective magnetic field, we owe it all to the stars!
About Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz
Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz is a Professor and the Vera Rubin Presidential Chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). After studying at the University of Cambridge, he was the John Bahcall Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Since joining the UCSC faculty in 2007, Ramirez-Ruiz has won a number of awards for his research, including a Packard Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the Niels Bohr Professorship from the Danish National Research Foundation, the HEAD Mid-Career Prize from the AAS and the Bouchet Award and the Dwight Nicholson Medal from the American Physical Society. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
A theoretical astrophysicist, Professor Ramirez-Ruiz is developing the conceptual framework needed to understand the violent and capricious nature of the Universe. He uses computer simulations to explore transient phenomena such as collisions, mergers, and disruptions of stars – especially those involving compact objects like black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs. He has authored or co-authored about two hundred and eighty research papers, two dozen in Science and Nature. He has lectured, broadcast and written widely on science and is a highly decorated teacher and research adviser. For over 14 years, Ramirez-Ruiz has built STEM training research programs. Ramirez-Ruiz’s mentees encompass over 200 students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty. In addition to his record of success as a research adviser, the mentoring program he created, Lamat (“star” in Mayan), has been remarkably successful at increasing the number of historically marginalized students who earn Ph.D.s in astrophysics. He is a current General Member of the Aspen Center for physics and has served as a Trustee since 2020.
Heinz R. Pagels Public Lecture Series
Heinz R Pagels was a professor of physics at Rockefeller University, president of the New York Academy of Science, a trustee of the Aspen Institute, and a member of the Aspen Center for Physics for twenty years, serving as a participant, officer, and trustee. He was also President of the International League for Human Rights. His work on chaos theory inspired the character of Ian Malcolm in the Jurassic Park book and movies. A part-time local resident, Professor Pagels died here in a mountaineering accident in 1988. His family and friends instituted the lecture series in his honor because he devoted a substantial part of his life to effective public dissemination of scientific knowledge.
