Sami Mikhail

Sami Mikhail is a lecturer at the University of St Andrews, UK. Prior to this he spent two years as a Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, followed by a couple of postdoc positions at the Universities of Bristol and Edinburgh, UK. His research is driven by the desire to understand how the interior workings of a planet influences its surface environment, and how this relates to long-term habitability. To achieve this he employs light volatile-element stable isotope data (C-N-O-Noble gases) from natural samples and complements these data with both high-pressure/temperature experiments and theoretical models. These data are presently being applied to study diamond-formation in Earth’s mantle, high-temperature nitrogen geochemistry, and the fundamental relationships between mantle processes and atmospheric chemistry on Earth, Mars and Venus.