Rocks and landforms at Earth’s surface, potentially hazardous volcanic and seismic activity, the response of Earth’s surface to icecaps that come and go with changing climate, and the slow but inexorable movement of continents all result from the interaction of physical and chemical processes taking place throughout Earth’s crust and mantle. With international interest and funding directed towards addressing both basic research questions and applied problems, the broad fields of geodynamics, structural geology, mineralogy and petrology are mainstays of geoscience research.Our ongoing and new capacity for microanalysis, including optical microscopy, energy- and wavelength-dispersive spectrometry, cathodoluminescence, and electron backscatter diffraction, along with grain- through orogen-scale numerical modeling and supercomputer applications, allow us to develop groundbreaking ideas related to coupled physical and chemical processes that shape Earth’s surface and drive evolution of its lithosphere.Our research program spans spatial scales from micrometers in individual mineral grains (deformation mechanisms, mineral chemistry, microstructures) to hundreds of kilometers in mountain belts (tectonic history, magmatism, structural development, and coupling of surface and deep processes). We study events that occurred from 4 billion years ago at the dawn of Earth’s history to those active today. We make observations of the natural world, using field, analytical, geochemical and geophysical datasets, and explain these observations using basic physical and chemical principles.We employ numerical and analogue modeling to test our explanations and conceptual predictions. Our most active research threads center on relating strain to surface evolution, mountain-scale dynamics, mid- to lower-crustal rheology, elastic anisotropy, earthquake geology, microstructural evolution, magma dynamics, pressure-temperature and chemical evolution of metamorphic rocks, stable isotope fractionation and mineral paragenesis
