Biography

My first real exposure to geology came while serving as a high school volunteer for the Student Conservation Association at Zion National Park. After spending two summers working as a field assistant in northern New Mexico for a geology professor at Williams College, I decided to change my major to geology. I headed west to graduate school at Stanford University, where I did field mapping and laboratory investigations of the Los Azufres Geothermal Field in Mexico and a detailed petrologic study of boninite series volcanic rocks from their type locality in the Bonin Islands of Japan.

I spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, where I was introduced into the world of experimental petrology. After a brief stint as a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara, I then moved to Unocal’s Hartley Research Center, where I ran the stable isotope laboratory. I then transferred to Unocal’s Geothermal Division, where I was involved in the exploration of geothermal systems in Indonesia, Central America, and South America.

I joined the former Earth Sciences Division of LBNL in 2000, and have been involved in a variety of geologic and geochemical research projects. I led LBNL’s efforts in the study of the Peña Blanca uranium deposits, a natural analogue for flow and transport processes at Yucca Mountain. From 2007 to 2009, I served as a detailee for the Geosciences Research Program of DOE’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences. I became the lead for LBNL’s Geothermal Systems Program in 2016.