Professor Mark Harrison of UCLA will be at ELSI during May and June 2025 and will deliver a series of four lectures in Mishima Hall as below:

(1) Wednesday 7 May from 14:00

‘How Do We Know How Old Earth Is?’

(2) Thursday 8 May from 14:00

‘How To Make A Habitable Earth’

(3) Thursday 15 May from 13:30

‘How Did Earth Get Its Water?’

(4) Thursday 15 May from 15:00

‘Was There A Late Heavy Bombardment?’

Speaker bio:

Prof. Harrison received a B.Sc.(Hons.) from the University of British Columbia in 1977 and Ph.D. from the Australian National University (ANU) in 1981. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, he spent 8 years at the State University of New York at Albany, rising from assistant to full professor.  In 1989, he moved to UCLA, where he served as chair of the Department of Earth and Space Sciences from 1997 to 2000. He took leave from UCLA to take up the Directorship of the Research School of Earth Sciences at ANU from 2001 to 2006, returning to UCLA as Director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.  He is currently Distinguished Research Professor of Geochemistry at UCLA.

Harrison commissioned the first high resolution ion microscope in his UCLA laboratory, was a pioneer of 40Ar/39Ar thermochronology, and later developed interests in both the tectonic evolution of the Tibet-Himalaya orogenic system and very early Earth.  His research of the latter documented the earliest known evidence of terrestrial oceans, plate tectonics, and life. Harrison is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, Geochemical Society, and Geological Society of Australia and was elected to both the Australian Academy of Science and the U.S. National Academy of Science. His research has been honored by numerous awards including the Arthur L. Day Medal of the Geological Society of America and Walter H. Bucher Medal of the American Geophysical Union.