Primary Investigator
Bob Downs has 25 years of experience (200 publications) in mineralogy and crystallography; 20 years of experience in mineralogical databases including the American Mineralogist C1ystal Structure Database with 351 million current hits, and 10 years with the RRUFF database of experimental chemical, X-ray diffraction and spectroscopic measurements of minerals receiving about 80,000 hits per week.
Paul Falkowski has over 38 years of experience in photobiophysics (>200 publications, two edited volumes, one co-authored text), and >25 years working on biogeochemical cycles (> 100 publications), and approximately a decade in astrobiology. Falkowski has appeared on several TV shows, including NHK, French 2, PBS, and National Geographic.
For over 29 years Fox's research has covered the fields of solar and solar-terrestrial physics, ocean and environmental informatics, computational and computer science, and distributed semantic data frameworks. The results are applied to large-scale distributed data science investigations.
Robert Hazen has 40 years’ experience (> 180 publications) in mineralogy and crystallography; 20 years’ experience (>80 publications) in origins of life and astrobiology research; 8 years’ experience (25 publications) in data-driven study of mineral evolution and the co-evolving geosphere and biosphere. In addition, Hazen has published 15 books and numerous articles on science for the general public and undergraduate non-science majors.
Four decades of research on Precambrian biologic and geologic evolution, early animal diversification; vascular plant evolution in geological time, mass extinctions, and the relationship between evolution and environmental change in Earth history. He is a member of science team for the MER rover mission to Mars.
Evolution of water-rock-biomolecule interactions from the molecular to the planetary scale. Development of new thermodynamic databases for aqueous species and minerals from surficial conditions to the elevated pressures and temperatures of the upper mantle in Earth.
Project Science Manager
Shaunna's research delves into the network relationships of mineral groups and using advanced analytics to study the Earth System.
Affiliated Scientists
Modern biology increasingly relies on high-throughput techniques. This trend challenges computational biologists to quickly extract as much useful information from the data as possible. In the genomic sense, this primarily implies correlating phenotypic differences with observed nucleotide sequence variations. On the protein side the challenge generally is to annotate protein function at reasonable accuracy levels. The whole organism level, then incorporates all types of evidence to annotate evolutionary history, current health conditions, and prognosed phenotypic changes.
My current research focuses on the minerals of boron and beryllium and the role of these two elements in the changes rocks undergo at high temperatures and pressures in the earth’s crust, especially in the granulite facies.
Daniel Hummer completed his Ph.D. at Penn State University specializing in mineralogy and crystallography. He is interested in the phase stability of minerals at high pressures and temperatures, and the kinetics of nucleation and crystal growth processes. He is currently working with Bob Hazen on topics in mineral evolution/ecology, including tracing the geologic history of minerals with redox sensitive elements, and analyzing Earth’s mineral diversity in order to predict and find new species - especially minerals of carbon.
The primary focus of my research is to understand the history and development of life using paleontological, sedimentological, and biogeochemical investigations of the ancient Earth. I am particularity interested in the Earth System and how the Geo- and Biospheres co-evolved. My research is inherently multidisciplinary and takes advantage of numerous analytical methodologies (both physical and virtual) which allows me to answer novel geobiological questions while easily collaborating across fields.
My research themes include:
I am a petrologist interested in tectonic problems. I address geologic problems concerning the evolution of orogenic regions primarily using petrologic and geochemical data. I am also interested in radiogenic isotope geology and oversee several geochemcial laboratories.
Jolyon is the founder of mindat.org. He started mindat as a personal mineral information database in 1993, which was later launched as a web site in October 2000. He also runs the gemdat.org website.
Simone Runyon is currently finishing a PhD at the university of Arizona. Her research investigates fluid-rock interactions in the upper crust, specifically in ore forming systems.
Ma is a geoinformatics researcher and conducts studies in the joint field of computer science and Earth and environmental sciences. He has worked on data interoperability for more than 10 years at several levels: discoverability, accessibility, decodability, understandability and usability. Recently he was working on provenance representation of data and provenance capture in a scientific workflow. His research interests include: conceptual modeling, crowd-sourcing geoinformation, data visualization, and spatio-temporal analysis of Big and Little Data.
Postdoc
Chao Liu hails from Yale University and joins as a postdoctoral associate working with Bob Hazen. He is developing new paleo-redox proxies from geochemical signatures of carbonate rocks. His research interests include carbonates, isotope geochemistry, paleo climate and Precambrian research.
I am interested in the development of protein structure evolution and how it has been influenced by the geosphere.
Drew received a B.S. in Biological Sciences from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Geosciences from Virginia Tech. As a paleontologist and geobiologist, his work focuses on fossils of complex eukaryotes in the late Neoproterozoic-early Paleozoic interval (~1000-450 Ma) of the geologic record. By studying the paleobiology and paleoenvironments of these fossils, his work aims to understand the rise of animal life and its impact on the Earth system.
Graduate Student
Ahmed Eleish is a graduate student in the Information Technology and Web Science department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute working with the Tetherless World Constellation. He received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Helwan University in Egypt, then went on to work at Oracle Corp. as a consultant, and is presently pursuing his Master's degree in Information Technology. His research interests include data science, data analytics and the semantic web.
I conduct database analyses to better understand mineral systems.
Evolution of water-rock-biomolecule interactions from the molecular to the planetary scale. Development of new thermodynamic databases for aqueous species and minerals from surficial conditions to the elevated pressures and temperatures of the upper mantle in Earth.
My research interests lie in the evolution of life’s energy transduction pathways. I approach this problem by considering the metal-containing enzymes responsible for electron transfer in both evolutionary and geological context. My time in the lab is currently spent investigating the sulfur reduction pathway for Thermovibrio ammonificans, a deep branching hyperthermophilic bacteria isolated at a Pacific deep sea vent.
Corey is a PhD student in Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. My research interest is data analytics and visualization using various techniques such as machine learning and data mining.
Feifei Pan is a Computer Science Ph.D. student working with Prof. Fox while still finishing her master's degree in Information Technology & Web Science. Her research interests include semantic Web, data science and analytics, and Machine Learning.
Anirudh Prabhu is currently pursuing his PhD at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research interests include Data Modeling, Semantic E-science, and Data Visualization. He has completed his masters project under Prof. Peter Fox and holds a Masters in IT at RPI.
Hao Zhong is a PhD student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Computer Science Department and works as a research assistant at the Tetherless World Constellation. He received his Bachelor degree in Economics from Sun Yat-sen University in China and M.S. in Applied Mathematics at RPI before he switched to Computer Science. His research interests includes data analytics, machine learning, semantic networks