GPS Open House
In collaboration with Caltech Astro and for our second event in the GPS Open House series, we were excited to host Dr. Jorge Cham (PhD comics) for a fun evening for families and kids. Jorge was talking about his new book, “Oliver’s Great Big Universe”, which breaks down our gigantic Universe in a kid friendly manner.
Summer research 23’
The lab hosted several undergraduate and high-school students for a summer of geochemical research.
Special mention for Rithika Chunduri, Dylan Cleveland and Phillip Vakoula for their respective contributions to our project on Ca isotopes as tracers of bone mass balance. They are now helping to turn their findings into peer-reviewed publications! Way to go!
Inaugural GPS Open House
Thanks to our NSF CAREER award, this May (2023) we held the first event of our GPS Open House series: an evening of science, art, and dinner for all! Next Open House happening in the Fall.
Special mention for graduate student Shane Houchin who led the organization of the event.
Caltech Alumni Annual Seminar Day, 23’
For Caltech’s 86th Annual Reunion (2023), geochemists and astronomers teamed up to give a broad audience presentation on the Frontiers in Geochemistry. We talked about the formation of organic matter in the interstellar medium, the evolution of the Solar System and studying atmospheres on exoplanets!
Summer research 22’
The lab hosted several students for a summer of research. All discovered how to measure the effects of climate change through paleoceanography.
Special mention for Annabelle Gao (Brown U.) who carefully investigated the impact of different cleaning procedures on U isotope data extracted from deep-sea corals, and is turning her findings into a paper!
Clair Patterson’s legacy
I had the pleasure to collaborate with the Veritasium YouTube channel, to help them feature the incredible story of leaded fuel and Clair Patterson. How his scientific journey to date the Earth led him to discover that Pb in gasoline was poisoning people across the globe, and how his findings were key to the Clean Air Act that banned leaded gasoline.
Elements issue, 21’
My close colleague Mauricio Ibañez-Mejia and I had the pleasure to guest edit an issue of Elements magazine. Articles are aimed for a broad audience, from academic and industrial scientists to students, popular science writers or policy makers. So proud of the amazing work the authors did and the final product (check it out here!).
For the occasion, we even created a companion website for a periodic table of heavy stable isotopes!
Cover credit to Guillermo Torres-Carreño.
Caltech Alumni Annual Seminar Day, 19’
For Caltech’s 82nd Annual Reunion (2019), I gave a broad audience presentation of the exciting research ongoing in my group, sharing some of the ups and downs of lab construction, and the exciting new avenues of research we are pursuing.
Talk title: From galactic chemical evolution to cancer: How isotope ratios track it all (18.5 MB).
International
The discovery (Tissot et al. 2016) that Curium-247 was present in the Early Solar System has ramifications for our understanding of the nucleosynthesis of the heavy elements (e.g., gold, uranium, plutonium, etc…).
In this popular science article published in the french magazine L’Astronomie (issue 113, Feb 2018), I explain to the general audience the context, pursuit, and implications of this discovery.
Science Festival
During my Ph.D., and in association with the Field Museum, I participated in the two inaugural editions of the France-Chicago Science Festival. We introduced high/middle school students to various topics in the Earth Sciences, including the origin of Earth and Earth's earliest history.
The display involved exhibit of meteorites, hands-on activities on how to recognize them and differentiate them from terrestrial rocks, as well as introduction to geological time-scales through posters. Download poster here (2.3 MB), and explanation here (168 KB).