We work on diamonds, their mineral and fluid inclusions, and their source rocks in Earth’s mantle. Ultimately, we want to understand the physical and chemical environment of diamond formation deep in Earth’s mantle and the conditions that accompany diamond preservation or lead to diamond destruction. To that end, we crush diamonds and pick their tiny inclusions for chemical analysis, or polish diamonds into plates to reveal their internal growth structure for imaging and isotopic analysis in our ion microprobe lab.

We work closely with the diamond industry for many of our projects and happily marry our curiosity-driven basic research with industry-relevant applications.