Olivia Harper Wilkins

I am an astrochemist who uses a combination of observational astronomy and laboratory astrophysics to understand some of the first chemical reactions that take place in the earliest stages of star formation. To do this, I mostly use the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a radio telescope in Chile, and I am building a cosmic ice lab at Dickinson to study ice chemistry. Before coming to Dickinson, I was a NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) Fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and I earned my Ph.D. in Chemistry at Caltech. I was also a Fulbright Research Fellow in the Cologne Laboratory Astrophysics Group at the University of Cologne in Germany before embarking on my Ph.D. At NASA, I conducted cosmic ice experiments that investigated the interplay between solid-state and gas-phase chemistry in both interstellar and cometary ices. At Caltech, much of my work used ALMA to investigate methanol chemistry in the Orion Kleinmann-Low (Orion KL) nebula. For my Ph.D. thesis, I was awarded the American Chemical Society Astrochemistry Subdivision Dissertation Award (2024), and I was named a CAS (a division of the American Chemical Society) Future Leader (2022). I wrote and illustrated the book Astrochemistry for the American Chemical Society's In Focus series.