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^{Dr. Ilsa Cooke (UBC),
Harrison-MacRae Lecture}

Abstract:

Dr. Ilsa Cooke will present “The unusual chemistry of interstellar molecules” to the Queen’s University community with funding from the Harrison-MacRae Lectureship in the Department of Chemistry.

Interstellar space is not empty, it contains a huge variety of molecules including some that have been found in space and never on Earth! In this talk, I will discuss how astrochemists find these molecules in space and what clues they can give us about other stars and planets. In addition, I will discuss how interstellar space provides an opportunity to study strange and exotic reactions that can defy chemical intuition.

����ֱ�� the Speaker. Dr. Ilsa Cooke is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of British Columbia. She leads the UBC Astrochem Lab, which studies how complex organic molecules form in the interstellar medium. Dr. Cooke is also a co-Principal Investigator with the GOTHAM collaboration and uses radio telescopes to probe aromatic molecules and their precursors in star-forming regions of space. Dr. Cooke was a lead researcher for the recent discovery the largest molecule ever detected by radioastronomy (and the third-largest in space!) published this fall in Science. She has won many awards for her research, most recently the Laboratory Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society 2024 Early Career Award_.