Graduate Student Research Opportunities

Graduate Research and Teaching Assistantships are available

Specific research opportunities include:

• Unprecedented experiments using 4.0-4.4 billion-year-old terrestrial minerals to test the hypothesis of early Earth plate tectonics
• Understanding the response of the lithosphere to continental collision through field and laboratory-based studies of the actively deforming Himalayan-Tibetan mountain system
• Prof. David Paige is a co-investigator on the Mars Climate Sounder (MCS) experiment of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)
• NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is scheduled to launch in late 2008. Prof. David Paige is the PI of the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment, which will search for water ice at the lunar poles.
• J. William Schopf is a Professor of Paleobiology and the Director of IGPP Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. His work in Paleobiology and Organic Geochemistry uses cutting-edge techniques – confocal laser scanning microscopy and two- and three-dimensional Raman spectroscopy (more...).
  
  

Resources

The Department houses the WM Keck Foundation National Center for Isotope Geochemistry, the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life, and the UCLA Center for Astrobiology, one of the lead teams of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. It is a major partner in the Southern California Earthquake Center and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics; and it is deeply involved in NASA's space missions such as the Genesis and STEREO missions aimed at studying the Sun, the POLAR, CLUSTER and Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) missions aimed at exploring the Earth's magnetosphere, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to study the moon, and the Cassini mission to Saturn. UCLA is also the lead institution for NASA's Dawn Discovery mission to Ceres and Vesta, the two largest asteroids.

Programs

The Geochemistry program offers opportunities in cosmochemistry, crystal chemistry, experimental petrology, isotopic studies of stable and radioactive elements, meteorite research, planetary physics, and lunar geochemistry.

The Geology program offers study in geomorphology, mineralogy, paleobiology, petrology, paleontology, remote sensing, sedimentology, stratigraphy, structural geology, and tectonics.

The Geophysics & Space Physics program offers study in seismology, satellite geodesy, earthquake physics, high pressure mineral physics, volcanology, geodynamics and geophysical fluid dynamics (mantle convection, plate tectonics, turbulence, magnetohydrodynamics, and laboratory and numerical studies of rotating convection and the geodynamo), nonlinear dynamics, complex system theory and the prediction of catastrophic events, planetary physics (orbital dynamics, planetary interiors, surfaces and atmospheres, solar-system origin), and space physics (magnetosphere, radiation belts, solar wind, magnetic fields, cosmic rays).

Astrobiology is a cross-disciplinary field that may be incorporated in any of the E&SS programs (http://astrobiology.ucla.edu).

Graduate students are provided resources and opportunities for professional development and growth and routinely utilize world-class research facilities, collaborate with researchers at national labs and other leading institutions, conduct field work and research world-wide, and present their work at national and international meetings. Alumni are leaders in academia, industry, and government research labs. UCLA is a vibrant academic and cultural community located between the coastal mountains and sandy beaches of Southern California.