John Hernlund: CV & Bio Sketch
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Curriculum Vitae

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Brief Bio Sketch

I was born in Rapid City, South Dakota, United States of America. My father, a chemical engineer specializing in petroleum refinement, moved our family often during my youth, to Michigan, Colorado, Illinois, North Dakota, and Missouri before I graduated from high school. I then moved to Arizona to attend Mesa Community College which was a feeder school for Arizona State University where I was a part of the young Barrett Honors College and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Geology with an emphasis in Geophysics in 2000. I then studied Geodynamics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with Paul Tackley and graduated with a Ph.D. in Geophysics & Space Physics in 2006. I spent my first year of post-doc at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP) in France where I collaborated with Stéphane Labrosse. I then moved to the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada as part of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Earth Systems Evolution Program (ESEP), collaborating with Mark Jellinek. I married my lovely wife Christine Houser in 2009 and moved to the University of California, Berkeley as a researcher. Owing to family constraints, I stayed in the Bay Area until 2013, where I launched my own research programs funded by a series of successful proposals to the National Science Foundation. We gave birth to my first child, Camilla Jane, in 2012. I joined a proposal with my collaborator Kei Hirose in Japan to launch a new Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) under the World Premiere International (WPI) research center initiative. Our ELSI proposal was successful, and we relocated to Tokyo in summer 2013 to help launch a new international institute with the ambitious vision to better understand the links between Earth and life, while focusing on their origin. My son, Ian Maxwell, was born in the back of an ambulance in 2015 while it was parked on a street in Tsukiji, Tokyo. After 3 years and 5 months of living in Japan, I was formally promoted to the position of full Professor (with tenure) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. We plan to continue at ELSI, and enjoy working at the institute we worked very hard to build.