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An Ohio University professor’s research helps us understand how elements connect us to the cosmos

By: David Forster
Posted on: Thursday, July 16, 2026

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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) — Elements, as in the periodic table of elements that hung on the walls of our science classrooms, are the building blocks of the world as we know it. But how are the elements themselves created? Where do they come from?

Andrea Richard is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and interim director of the Edwards Accelerator Lab at Ohio University. She conducts research into the origins of elements and how this knowledge has practical applications in our everyday lives.

Richard sat down to speak with WOUB’s David Forster for “Modern Science.”

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

On how elements connect us to the wonders of the cosmos

“The iron that’s in your blood, the lithium in the battery of your phone, those elements truly came from cosmic events that happened many years ago. Now we see those byproducts. That’s what makes up everything around us. That quote about ‘you’re made of star stuff’ is literally actually very true.

“These events are actually still happening. What we understand of this picture is coming from data that we observed a long time ago. But also a few years ago, in 2017, we saw the first what we call a neutron star merger. We saw evidence of elements being made in that event. These things are still happening, producing elements, and we’re trying to figure out how they get made and the dynamics of those environments.”

This is how we know elements are forming in the stars

“A lot of what we know about how elements are produced in stars is from observations with telescopes, actually. Ground based telescopes, space based telescopes. Because different elements from the periodic table are emitted at different wavelengths, we can actually distinguish the difference between a light particle, like iron, versus something that’s very heavy, like gold. Because they’re kind of emitted at different energies, telescopes can distinguish those. That’s how we know that those elements are actually made in different stars.”

On how elements came to Earth

“They come from different processes that have happened in the sort of the nursery where the solar system was born. They were all kind of floating in outer space. Then they came together to form all the things that we see around us.”

Could these processes be recreated in a lab?

“Yeah, we can actually do it. We can reproduce what we see in outer space here on Earth with with accelerator labs.”

On how the study of elements impacts our daily lives

“Understanding how elements were formed actually leads us into fields like nuclear medicine. Cancer treatment or if you’ve ever had a PET scan, those are all nuclear techniques that were birthed because of our understanding of how elements were formed. Not only do we want to understand the processes that created elements in the periodic table, but we want to understand then if we make some new thing, could we use this for cancer treatment? Or could we use this to generate power, things like that. There are a lot of practical applications that go beyond this field of nuclear astrophysics, which is what I do, and into nuclear medicine and things like that.”

The first draft of the transcript used for this story was created in Adobe Podcast, which includes an AI transcription tool. A WOUB news editor then reviewed, corrected and reformatted the transcript before publication.