Faculty
Véronique Le Roux
I am Associate Scientist with Tenure in the Geology and Geophysics department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Faculty member of the MIT/WHOI Joint Program.
Current Students and Postdocs
Molly Anderson
Molly is coming to WHOI as a prestigious NSF postdoctoral fellow, with a PhD from the University of Florida. As a seagoing marine scientist and geochemist, Molly studied the elemental and isotopic variability of mid-ocean ridge basalts to explore spatial and temporal changes in the oceanic mantle. At WHOI, she will focus her research on mantle-derived rocks from the East Pacific rise and the Mariana trench region to decipher the origin and distribution of volatiles in the solid Earth using primarily nitrogen and noble gases (under Pete Barry's mentorship) and other geochemical techniques.
Namitha Kumar
Namitha first came to WHOI in 2022 as a a Summer Student Fellow (undergraduate student) from the University of Michigan. She worked on investigating the processes that control deformation in the lower oceanic crust and its role in plate tectonics (collaborative project with postdoctoral investigator Rellie Goddard and WHOI scientist Andy Cross). Namitha entered the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in 2023 and is now working on volatile distribution in abyssal peridotites by SIMS for her phD, as well as on noble gas projects with Pete Barry.
Alumni
Emmanuel Codillo
Emmanuel started his PhD in June 2017. Emmanuel works on the role of mélange-peridotite interaction in the generation of arc magmas by performing high-pressure high-temperature experiments. With Frieder Klein, he works on hydrothermal alteration of ultramafic and mafic rocks. Emmanuel uses a combination of field, experimental and modeling approach to pursue his research.
Emmanuel started a prestigious Carnegie postdoctoral scholarship at the end of 2022.
Benjamin Urann
Ben graduated from the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Feb 2021 and worked on volatile distribution in hydrous and anhydrous mantle minerals using ion microprobe technique in order to understand fluid cycling in the mantle and crust.
Ben was a postdoctoral investigator at WHOI for a few months. He was offered a prestigious NSF fellowship and is now a postdoctoral fellow at University of Michigan.
Hugo Lestrelin
Hugo came in Feb 2020 as an undergraduate guest student from ENS Paris (France) and holds the record of the shortest internship in my lab. Hugo was supposed to perform SIMS measurements in serpentinized rocks, but went back to France in march 2020 due to the pandemic.
Emily Cooperdock
Emily came in 2017 as a Doherty Postodoctoral scholar at WHOI and was working on (U-Th)/He thermochronology and trace element geochemistry to 1) date magnetite that form during fluid alteration, 2) investigate the geochemical fingerprints of serpentinization at different tectonic settings, and 3) constrain the thermal history of mantle peridotites.
She is now Assistant professor at USC.
Ayla Pamukcu
Ayla had been a visiting postdoc based at Brown University and Princeton University before starting a postdoctoral fellowship at WHOI in the Fall of 2017. We collaborated on micro-CT acquisition of faceting experiments and melt inclusion work in Antartica.
She is now Assistant Professor at Stanford university.
Alicia 'Cici' Cruz-Uribe
Cici came in 2015 as a postdoctoral fellow sponsored by Horst Marschall and Glenn Gaetani to work on melting of pure melange materials from Syros (Greece). We collaborated on experiments that she conducted throughout her stay at WHOI.
She is now the Edward Sturgis Grew Assistant Professor School of Earth and Climate Science at the University of Maine.
Chenguang Sun
Chen came to WHOI as postdoctoral scholar (2015-2016). We collaborated on determining closure temperatures of trace elements in pyroxene grains to date the formation of mantle heterogeneties.
He is now Assistant professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences in Austin, TX.
Taylor Hough
Taylor came in 2017 as a Summer Student Fellow working on the formation of pyroxenites in the Josephine Ophiolite (Oregon). He used EPMA, LA-ICP-MS, REE closure temperatures and Nd isotopes by MC-ICP-MS to decipher the timing of vein formation in the mantle. Taylor pursued this project as part of his master thesis at Brown University.
He is now Research Assistant at Rice University (Houston, TX).
Emma Soucy
Emma came in 2015 from Northeastern University (Boston), and was working on calculating temperatures of rocks to understand how our planet Earth has cooled over time.
She is now a development assistant at Boston Harbor Now
Emmanuel Codillo
Emmanuel came in 2015 as a master thesis student from the University of Philippines. During his 9-month stay, he perfomed high-P high-T experiments to decipher how material is transported from subducted slabs to the source of arc lavas.
Marienel Basiga
Marienel came back from San Jose state University (California) as a Summer Student Fellow in the summer of 2015 to take on a new experimental project related to mass transport in the mantle wedge.
Keiji Hammond
Keiji came as a Northeastern University's Co-op program student (Jan-June 2015) to work on secondary-ion mass spectrometry measurements at WHOI (NENIMF). Keiji's project was to measure low concentrations of volatiles in mantle rock minerals to understand fluid cycling and hydrous melt percolation in subduction zones.
He is now Senior Museum Specialist at the American Museum of Natural History
Nathasha Garland and Maria Barrera
Tasha and Maria, students at Falmouth Academy, helped with photographing and labeling peridotite rocks from the WHOI rock repository during winter 2015. Their work is used to document our rock collection online.
Chris Connolly
Chris graduated from Falmouth high school in 2014. He was working in the WHOI Rock repository, documenting and photographing igneous rocks for three months in the Spring of 2014.
Marienel Basiga
Marienel applied to work in Le Roux's laboratory with the Partnership Education Program during summer 2014. Her internship was eventually extended with a guest student appointment. She performed high-pressure high-temperature experiments to investigate the fate of seawater in the deep Earth.
Ning Zhao
Ning was a MIT/WHOI Joint Program student (supervisor L. Keigwin) who temporarily abandoned his beloved foraminifera to performed high-pressure high-temperature experiments and ion microprobe analyses for one of his pre-generals projects in 2013.
Ning is now a professor at East China Normal University.
Jeremy Slaugenwhite
Jeremy was a guest student working on 3-D x-ray microtomography images using the Avizo software. He came as a guest student during Winter 2013 and is now a graduate student at UT Austin.