Joana C. Xavier is a computational biologist exploring Life's deepest question: how did Life on Earth begin? She seeks answers both with her laptop, supercomputers and team-work in London, United Kingdom. Passionate about biological phenomena and their interactions with non-living matter, she revealed fundamental properties of the microbial world that confront the limits of biology.
Xavier graduated from the first class of Bioengineers in the University of Porto and holds a PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and the University of Minho. She has now worked in five countries, including several institutes in Portugal (CIIMAR, IBMC-INEB, FEUP and ICBAS in Porto and CEB in Braga), Hungary (BRC Szeged), Germany (EMBL Heidelberg, University of Duesseldorf) and the USA (Argonne National Lab Chicago). She has published multiple articles in top scientific journals, spoken in numerous international conferences, and collaborates with scientists across the globe, from New Zealand to the USA. Her work focuses on the origin of the simplest life forms known, but also traverses fundamental computational tools to explore biology, early evolution, mathematical biology, metabolic networks, and chassis cells. Beyond the origin of life, she breathes meditation, travelling, philosophy and public engagement. Xavier presided over the organization of the 1st Symposium on Bioengineering in Porto in 2009, which continues to this day, and organized the first interdisciplinary meeting for early career researchers on the origin of life in Dusseldorf in 2018, which is also now in its third edition. She is co-founder and member of the executive board of OoLEN, the Origin of Life Early-career Network, an interdisciplinary and international community devoted to advance inclusion, post-disciplinarity, exchange, communication, community and quality in origins of life research.