This year's lecture promises to be both enlightening and engaging, featuring Sara Imari Walker. Sara Imari Walker is a distinguished scientist and astrobiologist whose research focuses on the origin of life and the search for life beyond Earth. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, where she co-directs the ASU Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. Walker is known for her interdisciplinary approach, combining physics, chemistry, biology, and computer science to explore the fundamental principles that underlie the emergence of life. Her work often delves into complex systems, information theory, and the role of information in the physics of life, aiming to understand how life might arise in alien environments. This involves theoretical studies on the nature of the biochemical networks that characterize living systems, and how these networks might be detected on other planets. Dr. Walker's contributions to astrobiology and theoretical biology are paving the way for new understandings of life as a cosmic phenomenon, challenging and expanding our concepts of what life is and where it might exist in the universe.