My Career as a Mineral Physicist at Stony Brook: 1976–2019

Abstract

In 1976, I took up a faculty position in the Department of Geosciences of Stony Brook University. Over the next half century, in collaboration with graduate students from the U.S., China and Russia and postdoctoral colleagues from Australia, France and Japan, we pursued studies of the elastic properties of minerals (and their structural analogues) at high pressures and temperatures. In the 1980s, together with Donald Weidner, we established the Stony Brook High Pressure Laboratory and the Mineral Physics Institute. In 1991, in collaboration with Alexandra Navrotsky at Princeton University and Charles Prewitt at the Geophysical Laboratory, we founded the NSF Science and Technology Center for High Pressure Research.