Organization of the meeting

The week of May 24-28 will be a conference for up to 400 people. All are welcome to register and to contribute abstracts for talks and posters. There will be morning and afternoon talk sessions, with each session including a keynote lecture of 1 hour and contributed talks of 30 minutes. Lunchtime breaks will be long enough to allow communication time for participants.

The following week (May 30th - June 4th) will be a workshop for around 50 participants. This will focus on informal discussions and establishing new collaborations between the participants. You are encouraged to bring along your own ideas and propose topics for discussion and new research work that fits somewhere in the broad themes of the conference. Participants for the workshop will be selected from among those requesting to attend (please fill in the information on the separate workshop application form). Financial support is available for those attending the workshop.

Review talks (R): 50 min + 10 min. discussion
Contributed talks (C): 25min + 5 min. discussion

Talks begins each day at 9am unless otherwise indicated.

Three sessions per day on full days, 2 sessions on each of Thursday and Saturday.
Most sessions will have 2 contributed talks. These should be in the general area covered by the review speaker.

All conference talks are held in MDCL (McMaster Centre for Learning & Discovery) Rm 1305, and poster sessions and coffee will be held in the lobby of that building near to the lecture hall.

Download Talks
  Please note that several talks are now available for download on the OI main website here.

Tuesday  May  24 PROTOSTELLAR AND PROTOPLANETARY DISKS  |  TREE OF LIFE  |  OBSERVATIONS OF PLANETARY SYSTEMS
08:00	Conference and Workshop Registration, Coffee & Continental Breakfast
08:45	Welcome - Ralph Pudritz, Director of the Origins Institute Opening - Mamdouh Shoukri, Vice-President Research, McMaster University
09:00	David Wilner - Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Protoplanetary Disks (R) -  ABSTRACT
09:30
10:00	Gerald Schieven - Joint Astronomy Centre Observations of Debris Disks with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (C) -  ABSTRACT
10:30	Robi Banerjee - McMaster University The formation of proto-planetary disks (C) -  ABSTRACT
11:00	Morning Coffee
11:30	Herve Philippe - Université de Montréal Phylogenomics and the tree of life (R) -  ABSTRACT
12:00
12:30	Lunch - Commons Building More Information
13:00
13:30
14:00	J. Peter Gogarten - University of Connecticut Is the “Tree of Life” a Tree? (C) -  ABSTRACT
14:30	Jim Lake - University of California, Los Angeles The Ring of Life Provides Evidence for a Fusion Origin of Eukaryotes (C) -  ABSTRACT
15:00	Afternoon Coffee & Poster Session
15:30
16:00	Shay Zucker - Weizmann Institute of Science Observations Of Extrasolar Planetary Systems (R) -  ABSTRACT
16:30
17:00	Edward Thommes - Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics A safety net for rapidly-migrating protoplanets (C) -  ABSTRACT
17:30	Jeremy Richardson - NRC/NASA Goddard First Light from Extrasolar Planets and Implications for Astrobiology (C) -  ABSTRACT
20:00	Pub Night Slainte Traditional Irish Pub - 33 Bowen St., Hamilton http://www.slainteirishpub.ca/
Wednesday  May  25 EXTREMOPHILES  |  PLANET FORMATION  |  FOSSILS
08:00	Coffee & Continental Breakfast, Centre for Learning and Discovery - Outside Room 1305
08:30	Karl O. Stetter - University of Regensburg, Lehrstuhl für Mikrobiologie Hyperthermophilic Life on Earth – and on Mars? (R) -  ABSTRACT
9:00
09:30	Carrine Blank - Washington University Ancestral character state reconstruction and evolutionary patterns of traits in the prokaryotes (C) -  ABSTRACT
10:00	Bharat Patel - Griffith University The limits to life under dual extremities of high temperature and salinity (C) -  ABSTRACT
10:30	Morning Coffee
11:00	Doug Lin - University of California, Santa Cruz Dynamical Shakeup and Transition from Chaos to Stability During the first 50 Myr of Solar System Formation (R) -  ABSTRACT
11:30
12:00	Pawel Artymowicz - University of Toronto at Scarborough Dynamics and structure in stellar and protoplanetary disks (C) -  ABSTRACT
12:30	Lunch - Commons Building More Information
13:00
13:30	Lucio Mayer - University of Zurich Giant Planet Formation via disk instability (C) -  ABSTRACT
14:00	William Schopf - University of California, Los Angeles The Earliest History Of Life: Solution To Darwin's Dilemma (R) -  ABSTRACT
14:30
15:00	Afternoon Coffee & Poster Session
15:30
16:00	Max Bernstein - NASA Ames Research Center The Role of Radiation in Making Meteoritic Organics and False Biomarkers (C) -  ABSTRACT
16:30	Brett Gladman - University of British Columbia Impact re-seeding of the early biosphere (C) -  ABSTRACT
20:00	Origins Institute Public Lecture: Chris McKay More Information: http://origins.mcmaster.ca/lectures05/plecture01.html
20:30
Thursday  May  26 ORGANIC CHEMISTRY/RIBOZYMES  |  COMPLEXITY
08:00	Coffee & Continental Breakfast, Centre for Learning and Discovery - Outside Room 1305
08:30	David Deamer - University of California Artificial life: On the horizon? (R) -  ABSTRACT
9:00
09:30	Peter Unrau - Simon Fraser University Nucleotide synthesis and RNA polymerization by RNA catalysts (C) -  ABSTRACT
10:00	Anthony Poole - Stockholm University Modern mRNA proofreading & repair: clues that the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) possessed an RNA genome? (C) -  ABSTRACT
10:30	Morning Coffee
11:00	Eors Szathmary - Budapest University Origin Of Life--Structures And Dynamics (R) -  ABSTRACT
11:30
12:00	Stuart Kauffman - Santa Fe Institute Towards a physical definition of life: Molecular autonomous agents (C) -  ABSTRACT
12:30	Lunch - Boxed Lunch To Go
13:00
13:30	Niagara Falls Excursion
Friday  May  27 SEARCH FOR LIFE  |  EUKARYOTES  |  GEOCHEMISTRY
08:30	Coffee & Continental Breakfast, Centre for Learning and Discovery - Outside Room 1305
09:00	Lynn Rothschild - NASA Ames Research Center Extremophiles: defining the envelope for the search for life in the universe (R) -  ABSTRACT
09:30
10:00	Francois Raulin - LISA UMR CNRS & Univ. Paris 12 & Paris 7 Titan: a new astrobiological vision of Titan from the Cassini-Huygens data (C) -  ABSTRACT
10:30	Roger Knacke - Penn State Erie, Behrend College Slime Worlds: Possiblities for Detection of Land-based Microbial Life on Extrasolar Planets (C) -  ABSTRACT
11:00	Morning Coffee
11:30	Martin Embley - University of Newcastle Archezoa,mitochondria and early eukaryotic evolution (R) -  ABSTRACT
12:00
12:00	Debashish Bhattacharya - University of Iowa The origin of photosynthetic eukaryotes (C) -  ABSTRACT
12:30	Lunch - Commons Building More Information
13:00
13:30
14:00	Radhey Gupta - McMaster University Evolutionary Relationships Among Bacteria (C) -  ABSTRACT
14:30	Adolf Seilacher - University of Tubingen / Yale University Ediacara Metazoans; why didn't they radiate immediately? (R) -  ABSTRACT
15:00
15:00	Afternoon Coffee & Poster Session
15:30
16:00	Jason Fiege - University of Manitoba The Ocean & Ice of Europa: Results from a Genetic Algorithm-Powered Planetary Structure Code (C) -  ABSTRACT
16:30	Jon Telling - University of Toronto Compound specific hydrogen and carbon isotopes as a tool to distinguish abiogenic from biogenic hydrocarbons: implications for the terrestrial deep biosphere and astrobiology (C) -  ABSTRACT
18:00	Conference Reception Dinner Ramada Hotel, Victoria/Albert Room
Saturday  May  28 ASTROBIOLOGY  |  METAZOA
08:30	Coffee & Continental Breakfast, Centre for Learning and Discovery - Outside Room 1305
09:00	Chris McKay - NASA Ames Research Center Astrobiology (R) -  ABSTRACT
09:30
10:00	Richard Greenberg - University of Arizona Europa, the Ocean Moon: Tides, permeable ice, and life (C) -  ABSTRACT
10:30	Darlene Lim - NASA Ames Research Center Investigating Freshwater Microbialites at Pavilion Lake, B.C., Canada and their Mars analogue potential (C) -  ABSTRACT
11:00	Morning Coffee
11:30	Graham Budd - Uppsala University Modes of evolution in the Cambrian Explosion: ecology, not snowballs! (R) -  ABSTRACT
12:00
12:30	Alfred Roca - Laboratory of Genomic Diversity, NCI Did Solenodons Survive the Chicxulub Bolide Impact within the Proto-Antilles? (C) -  ABSTRACT
13:00	Desmond Collins - Royal Ontario Museum The Burgess Shale and Chengjiang Faunas - clear windows to the marine animal communities that emerged from the Cambrian Explosion (C) -  ABSTRACT
13:30	Conference BBQ - The Phoenix (Wentworth House), campus pub & grill