Dr. Yael Kapon

Yael Kapon’s background is in physics, and her research connects physical principles with chemical and biological systems. In her postdoctoral work, she studies how molecular materials acquire functional properties in early Earth environments.

Dr. Kapon earned her PhD in Applied Physics from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studied the Chiral Induced Spin Selectivity phenomenon in organic systems, in which electron transport through chiral molecules is spin-dependent. Many biological molecules are chiral: they exist in forms that are mirror images of one another but cannot be superimposed (like our right and left hands). Her research helped show how magnetic surfaces can interact selectively with chiral molecules and influence biochemical processes and self assembly, including protein aggregation pathways such as amyloid formation, relevant to both biological function and disease.
In her first postdoctoral position, in the Chemistry Department at Hebrew University, Dr. Kapon studied how molecular building blocks self assemble under environmentally relevant conditions, focusing on design rules for prebiotic systems and functional materials.

Now, as a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, Dr. Kapon investigates how layered minerals and molecular materials may have contributed to early membrane like systems. A central question in her work is how membrane forming lipids, one of life’s fundamental components, could have formed and assembled under plausible prebiotic conditions. While many classes of biomolecules have been synthesized under early Earth and other planetary conditions, no prebiotically plausible pathway has yet been shown for membrane forming lipids, despite their abundance in planetary environments and certain meteorites.

Her goal is to establish environmentally plausible routes by which such lipids could be synthesized, assembled into membranes, and endowed with functions such as charge transport and energy capture. This would broaden current models of chemical evolution and clarify how geological environments could organize chemistry into protocell like systems.