Curriculum Vitae
Click here to download the latest version of my CV (PDF).
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.