Research Interests

I am primarily interested in the global-scale problems concerning the terrestrial planets and icy moons of the solar system. I wish to understand the physical processes that control the evolution of these objects. I focus on geodynamic approaches to these problems, such as mantle convection, elastic flexure, and viscoelastic relaxation. My goal is to look at the big picture; to understand why the planets and moons look the way they do, what they were like early in their history, and how they evolved to their present state.

My research falls in the realm of Planetary Geodynamics. Geodynamics is the study of the internal movements of the Earth. It involve processes such as mantle convection, tectonics, and deformation of earth materials. We need to consider rheology (material properties), heat transfer, and even the gravitational and geoid response to all these internal dynamics. Although most geodynamicists study the earth, I investigated these processes in the context of other planetary bodies, particularly Mars and Enceladus, a moon of Saturn.

I'm in the Earth and Planetary Sciences department at the University of California at Santa Cruz, working with Francis Nimmo who can sometimes be difficult to find.

Here is a pdf version of my Curriculum Vita. A list of publications with links to pdfs can be found at the bottom of the page.

These are some of the specific projects I've been working on. I've given just a brief summary below. For more information on any topic, click on the title to be taken to another page dedicated to that project.

Enceladus: Tidal Dissipation, Subsurface Oceans and the South Polar Thermal Anomaly

Enceladus != Enchiladas

Recently, I've been working on 3D tidal heating and convection models for icy satellites. In particular, I've been focusing on Enceladus (en-SEH-la-dus), a small-to-medium size moon of Saturn. The satellite is named after a giant in ancient Greek mythology, believed to be buried under Mt. Aetna. If you use the Italian pronunciation, you get "en-che-LA-dus", hence the image to the right. Enceladus is a particularly interesting target, given the south polar thermal anomaly, showing massive heat flux and vapor escape from a world thought to be dead before Cassini arrived, and shattered that image like an Iron Hammer of the Apostles. The popular idea at the moment is that orbital energy from Enceladus' eccentric orbit about Saturn is being dissipated as heat in the ice shell. But is tidal heating sufficient to explain the observations? And are there other ways of doing it? That's what I'm testing.

Large-scale structures on Mars: The Hemispheric Dichotomy and the Tharsis Rise.

My recently finished thesis work focussed on Martian Geodynamics. I find this field so interesting, because we can answer important first-order questions about the shape of Mars. Why is there a hemispherical dichotomy? Why is it oriented north-south?  Why is Tharsis so big? How active was the planet in the past? Topography and gravity data from the many spacecraft missions are the primary observations we can use to study these problems. I developed theoretical and computational models to explain these observations. Just by looking at the MOLA topography map below, you can tell that something is up.


Courtesy: NASA/GSFC

Impact heating and planetary dyanmos

Refereed Publications

Published papers

Conference Proceedings and Abstracts