Professor Shaunna Morrison is an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. She explores large, interdisciplinary questions through a mineralogical lens. Minerals are the oldest and most robust materials in our solar system. Minerals record their history of formation and therefore the evolution of environments, planets, and the universe. Minerals are time-machines.
Professor Morrison builds on her technical and theoretical background in crystallography, crystal chemistry, and martian mineralogy, to explore new techniques in multidimensional, multivariate analysis and visualization by employing a range of advanced analytics and machine learning techniques to better understand the complex relationships among Earth and planetary materials, their formational environments through deep time, and their coevolution with the biosphere, including identifying and characterizing mineralogical signs of life. Her research interests include mineralogical signs of life and data-driven approaches to characterizing the coevolution of the geosphere and biosphere.
