Lecture | Harold Linnartz Astrochemistry Prize lecture
From Atoms to Asteroids: How Chemistry Governs the Birth of Planets
- Ilse Cleeves, Professor of Astronomy and Chemistry from the University of Virginia
- Date
- Thursday 5 June 2025
- Time
- Address
-
Gorlaeus Building
Einsteinweg 55
2333 CC Leiden - Room
- CM 1.26
It is with great pleasure that we announce the establishment of the annual Harold Linnartz Astrochemistry Prize lecture. This award targets early career researchers that are active at the boundary of astronomy and chemistry. The award is named in honour of professor Harold Linnartz, who passed away late 2023 and whose research embodied the interdisciplinary nature of Astrochemistry.
Everyone is welcome, no registration necessary. The lecture, aimed at a broad audience, will be followed by a festive "borrel".
The lecture will also be live streamed. The link to the stream – and the recording afterwards – will be shared on this page soon.
About the lecture
Understanding how planets form – and what makes our own solar system unique – has become an inherently interdisciplinary question, drawing on astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, and planetary science. The process begins in protoplanetary disks, where chemistry determines the availability and distribution of elements that will eventually form planetary bodies.
Observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have revealed the physical structure of these disks in remarkable detail, mapping the distribution of key molecules and tracing the evolution of gas and dust across disk surfaces.
Complementing this, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is now opening up previously hidden regions: the warm inner disk, where terrestrial planets form, and the cold outer midplane, where ices — the main reservoirs of volatile elements for rocky bodies — reside.
Together, these observatories are offering new four-dimensional views of planetary nurseries in space and time, reshaping our theoretical understanding of the initial conditions that govern planetary system architectures and compositions.
About the speaker
Ilse Cleeves earned her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2015 and held a prestigious Hubble Fellowship at Harvard University from 2015 to 2018. Her research focuses on the molecular and physical conditions that govern the birth of planetary systems, using interstellar molecular emission as a window into planet-forming environments.
