BES: Interdisciplinary Opportunities in Mineral Sciences: From the Nanoscale to the Moon | Institute for Renewable and Sustainable Energy

Abstract:

Mineralogy is an ancient science, with writings on the properties of minerals dating back to the 4th century BC in various cultures. Today, minerals are seen as containers with ingredients necessary for the development of a low-emission economy, and their extraction will soon begin on Earth. Mineral sciences are broad, and this perspective creates opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration in various fields of science, engineering and medicine. Originally focused on studying the properties of minerals under extreme conditions of pressure, temperature, radiation etc. in geophysical sciences, through collaborative opportunities my journey in mineral sciences has led to technology transfer where extreme environments are a tool to create, modify and control the properties of materials from some basic scientific applications in energy, nanotechnology and extraterrestrial construction.

Biography:

Steve Jacobsen is a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern University and a faculty member of the Institute for Sustainability and Energy. Paula M. Trienens and Northwestern’s Center for Sustainability and Resilience Engineering. He has received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) through the National Science Foundation, a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, and was editor of Geophysical Research Letters from 2018 to 2023. Before joining Northwestern, he was the Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bavarian Geoinstitute in Germany and the Barbara McClintock Postdoctoral Fellow at the Earth and Planetary Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution for Science. He obtained a Ph.D. in geophysics in 2001 from the University of Colorado Boulder.