Computational Mineral Physics: A Practical Guide for Earth Scientists

Razvan Caracas is a computational mineral physicist with a background in both geology and materials sciences. He was awarded a Ph.D. from the Catholic University of Louvain prior to a post-doctoral position at the University of Minnesota, a Carnegie Fellowship at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and a Humboldt Fellowship at the University of Bayreuth. He is a Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America, a recipient of the Dana Medal of the same society, and a member of the Academia Europaea. He is presently a senior researcher at the Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris, working on a wide range of topics in planetary mineralogy, going from the supercritical state that dominated the protolunar disk, to the internal structure of exoplanets. With the help of atomistic simulations, his work explores the early Earth’s evolution – helping to decipher the condensation of the Earth and the Moon, the formation of the primordial atmosphere, and exploring what conditions planets must fulfil to make prebiotic chemistry thrive.