Past Events 2021-22

Shaunna M. Morrison is a mineralogist and planetary scientist with expertise in crystallography, crystal chemistry, and the application of data-driven techniques.

Morrison is the 4D (Deep Time Data Driven Discovery) Initiative Co-Director at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Earth and Planets Laboratory, former Project Manager of the Carnegie led Deep-Time Data Infrastructure (DTDI), a Co-Investigator of the CheMin X-ray diffraction instrument on the NASA Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, a collaborator on the NASA Astrobiology ENIGMA Project, a Co-Investigator of the NASA Astromaterials Data System, and a data contributor and collaborator of the RRUFF Project, including the Mineral Evolution Database (MED), Mineral Properties Database (MPD), and the Evolutionary System of Mineralogy Database (ESMD). 

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.

Don White is a Senior Geophysicist at the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), where he works in the field of applied seismology. Since 2001, his research has focused on geophysical methods for monitoring underground storage of CO₂. This work was conducted as part of the Weyburn- Midale CO₂ Monitoring and Storage Project (2001 to 2011) and then in the Aquistore CO₂ storage project (2010-2021).

Following graduation from the University of Toronto (B.Sc., Physics) and UBC (M.Sc., and Ph.D., Geophysics), Dr. White joined the Geological Survey of Canada as a post-doctoral fellow in 1989. While at the GSC he has served as an Adjunct Professor at Polytechnique Montréal and the Ottawa-Carleton Earth Science Center.

Robert M. Hazen is the Senior Scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and the Robinson Professor of Earth Science, Emeritus at George Mason University. He received his degrees in geology from MIT and Harvard. He has authored more than 450 articles and 25 books on science, history, and music. His recent book The Story of Earth (Viking-Penguin) was a finalist in the Royal Society and Phi Beta Kappa science book competitions.

Throughout his career, Hazen has received numerous awards, including the 2021 IMA Medal, the 2016 Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America, and the 2012 Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award. In 2020 he was elected Foreign Member of the Russian National Academy of Sciences. The biomineral “hazenite” was named in his honor.

Since 2008, Hazen and his colleagues have explored “mineral evolution” and “mineral ecology”—new approaches that exploit large and growing mineral data resources to understand the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere. In October 2016, Hazen retired from a 40-year career as a professional trumpeter, during which he performed with numerous ensembles including the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Ballet, and National Symphony.

Dr. Sasha Wilson is Associate Professor and the Canada Research Chair in Biogeochemistry of Sustainable Mineral Resources. She leads the Environmental Economic Geology Lab in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta. Dr. Wilson is a mineralogist/biogeochemist whose work focuses on environmental aspects of economic geology and on chemical sedimentology. She uses mineral behaviour, with a particular focus on crystal chemistry, to understand and manage environmental change in engineered and natural settings. Her research employs fieldwork, analytical geochemistry and experiments in the field, laboratory and at synchrotron light sources.

Dr. Steven Hallam is a University of California Santa Cruz and Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained molecular biologist, microbial ecologist, entrepreneur, and innovator with over 20 years of experience in field and laboratory research. He is Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and a Leopold Leadership Fellow at the University of British Columbia. He is also a program faculty member in the Bioinformatics and Genome Sciences and Technology training programs at UBC. Dr. Hallam co-directs the ECOSCOPE innovation ecosystem consisting of an NSERC CREATE training program, a research network, the Biofactorial core facility for high-throughput screening, and a curriculum development initiative in data science (EDUCE) based on four research and training pillars: i) microbial ecology, ii) biological engineering, iii) data platforms, and iv) networking and entrepreneurship. His research intersects these pillars with specific emphasis on creation of functional screens and computational tools to reveal hidden metabolic powers of the microcosmos. His laboratory developed MetaPathways, a scalable annotation and analysis pipeline to predict metabolic interactions from environmental sequence information. Other research areas include single-cell genome sequencing and biosensor development for environmental monitoring and high-throughput enzyme discovery. In 2016, he co-founded Koonkie Inc., a bioinformatics consulting company that designs and provides scalable algorithmic and data analytics solutions in the cloud.

Dr. Dan Shugar is Associate Prof essor of Geoscience and Director of the Environmental Science Program at the University of Calgary. His main area of expertise is rapid geological change, particularly in alpine environments, but he has also worked on slower phenomena in flatter environments, including sea level change, fluvial geomorphology, and permafrost. He serves as a Scientific Editor for the Journal of Glaciology and is a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Dr. Shugar earned a BSc in physical geography from Carleton University, an MSc in physical geography from the University of Guelph, and a PhD in earth sciences from Simon Fraser University. He was a Hakai-Mitacs postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington Tacoma prior to joining the UCalgary.