Education: PhD Physics
Location: Madrid, Spain
Other Affiliations: Centro de Astrobiología (CAB, CSIC-INTA)
Contact: celia.blanco@bmsis.org, Celia.blanco@cab.inta-csic.es
Links: Website
Dr. Celia Blanco is a theoretical physicist and astrobiologist who studies how life begins and where it goes. She is primarily drawn to the big question of how chemistry becomes biology. In particular, she is trying to understand how molecules evolve and acquire function and what the history of life on Earth can tell us about finding it elsewhere. Her approach is theoretical and computational, built on mathematical models, simulation, and the analysis of large sequence datasets.
Dr. Blanco began her research career at the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB, CSIC-INTA) in Spain, and spent more than ten years at institutions in the United States (UCSB and UCLA). She has now returned to CAB as a Ramón y Cajal Fellow. Alongside her research on origins, she is interested in the longer arc of life and intelligence, including how technological civilizations persist, falter, and might be recognized from a distance.
Dr. Blanco’s BMS Team:
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Dr. Blanco’s Bibliography Under BMS's affiliation:
In progress
Projections of Earth's Technosphere: Civilization Collapse-Recovery Dynamics and Detectability
C. Blanco, J. Haqq-Misra, G. Profitiliotis · Under review
2026
From rule-taking to rule-making chemistry: a minimal population–environment feedback model
C. Blanco · Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 23(242), 20251306
The Case for Integrating Astrobiology Before, During, and After Crewed Space Missions
C. Blanco, A. Berea, A. Mohanty, A. Poddar, R.B. Gupta · Astrobiology, online ahead of print
Context Without Contact: Top-Down Information Flow from Shared Modulation in Uncoupled Prebiotic Systems
C. Blanco · Royal Society Open Science, 13(4), 251750
Molecular Complexity Constrained Early Amino Acid Recruitment into the Genetic Code
S.A. Hashmi, H. Chok, R. Cabrera, C. Blanco · Genome Biology and Evolution, 18(3), evag012
What it takes to solve the origin of life: An integrated review. Part 1 — Experimental methods and data repositories
OoLEN et al. · Cell Reports Physical Science, 7(4), 103212
What it takes to solve the origin of life: An integrated review. Part 2 — Theoretical methods and emerging trends
OoLEN et al. · Cell Reports Physical Science, 7(4), 103211
2025
DNA tokenization efficiently compresses information and reflects phylogenetic relationships
T. Noll-Walker, K. Elasri, C. Balkan, E. Jo, H.J. Cleaves II, M. Sandora, C. Blanco · Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2025 (ALIFE 2025), MIT Press, 37, 23
Space Settlement and Astrobiology — Connections and Overlaps
A. Berea, C. Blanco, J. Haqq-Misra, S. Som, G. Profitiliotis, G. Lau · Space Policy, 76, 101727
EasyDIVER+: An Advanced Tool for Analyzing High Throughput Sequencing Data from In Vitro Evolution of Nucleic Acids or Amino Acids
C. Blanco, A. Tee, P. Sharma, M.S. Newton, K. Lee, S.E. Erickson, B. Seelig, I.A. Chen · J Mol Evol, 93(2), 229–237