The University of British Columbia

I am an igneous petrologist interested in unraveling age and provenance of magmatic rocks together with processes that give rise to their great diversity in both Phanerozoic continental arcs and Archean cratons. To this end I use a range of geochemical and radiometric tools applied at the whole-rock and single mineral scale. I developed a passion for geochemistry during my MSc study in the Sifton Range of the southern Yukon Territory. My PhD work took me to the high Andes where I quantitatively surveyed intrusive rocks along a 1,800 km-transect of the Peruvian Eastern Cordillera using a range of laboratory and analytical techniques that include various modalities of mass spectrometry, in situ U-Pb dating of zircons, electron and ion microprobes. In 2008, I was awarded the Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship to attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology and experiment on high pressure (≥4GPa) and temperature hydrous-phase equilibria and water storage in deep planetary interiors. Most recently, I served as the diamond geologist with Canadian Federal Government in Yellowknife where I studied kimberlitic occurrences and their constituent mantle xenoliths as probes of the northern Canadian lithospheric mantle. Work on mantle geochemistry was complemented by fingerprinting crustal growth of the Slave craton via the combined use of U-Pb and Hf-O isotope systematics in detrital zircons.

I am the principal investigator and manager of the Western Tethyan Metallogeny Project; a study aimed at deciphering regional tectono-magmatic controls on siting of large porphyry Cu and epithermal precious metal deposits from the Balkans to Iran.