Research Interests


    My research interests fall into the following two general areas:

    1) Earth's response to glaciation and deglaciation on time-scales from 100,000 years (i.e., a glacial cycle) to 10's years (e.g., the ongoing ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland), including deformation of Earth's mantle and crust, sea-level change, gravity anomalies change, and polar motion. This research has two main goals: i) to understand the Earth's mantle rheology and viscosity by modeling the observations of relative sea-level changes, crustal deformation (via GPS) and gravity change (e.g., GRACE) that are caused by (de)glaciation processes; ii) to understand the impact of deglaciation on sea level changes and land motions. We develop the open source (via github) numerical modeling software package CitcomSVE that runs efficiently and accurately on massively parallel computers.

    2) Dynamical evolution of terrestrial planets including Earth, Mars, Venus, the Moon, ...). Thermal convection in the planetary mantles is the main physical processes that control the evolution of terrestrial planets. We are particularly interested in formation of long-wavelength convective structures in the mantle (e.g., subducted slabs and large low shear-wave velocity provinces (LLSVP), as imaged in seismic tomography) and their surface manifestation in large-scale tectonics (e.g., supercontinent cycles throughout the Earth's history), surface topography and volcanism (e.g., crustal dichotomy and Tharsis Rise on Mars, and mare basalts on the Moon), and gravity anomalies. On the planetary science side, I am particularly interested in understanding the lunar interior structure as possibly inferred from observations of tidal deformation and tidal observations. I am also very much interested in the formation of lunar fossil bulge (i.e., degree-2 shape and gravity anomalies of the Moon) and its implication for the evolution of lunar orbit. To study the dynamics of mantle convection and its surface manifestation, we use both instability analyses and numerical simulation in our research. We were the main developer of open source convection modeling package CitcomS which like CitcomSVE mentioned early was one of the first open source codes and runs efficiently on massively parallel computers.

    I also have strong interests in high performance computing and numerical analysis. See an example of how a planet is cut to fit to parallel computers. Here is for multigrid .

  • Our research has been supported by the NSF, NASA, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the Sloan Foundation..





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