Researching
how minerals interact with their environments and with living things, and how those minerals can be used to solve problems like climate change, pollution, and disease.
Critical Materials Research
advancing pharmaceuticals
heavy metal entombment
selective REE and Li capture
Mineral Discovery & Design
new functional minerals for environmental applications
how nature can inform technological innovation
Origins & Habitability of Life
life in extreme environments
mineralogical biomarkers
history of life in our solar system
Raman microscope with custom capillary furnace at NHM. This kind of experimental setup allows the experimentalist to follow chemical and mineralogical changes that are happening in near real-time as the reactions are happening. It's this type of work that opens the door to exploring new ways to selectively trap rare earth elements (as well as radioactive and other toxic elements) from waste streams, mining operations, and from the human body.
It might not look "clean," but this mineral (black powder) is easy to make and extremely good for spontaneous lithium uptake from water.
Highly Selective Minerals
Using minerals to remove metals from the environment, and advance our critical material recovery.
The goals of this work could advance pharmaceutical development, environmental remediation of fossil fuels spills/leaks, build minerals for better CO2 capture, and develop minerals for safe long-term radioactive waste sequestration. These same minerals can also be used to absorb rare earth elements from waste streams and from the human body (e.g. gadolinium used or MRI contrast). In addition, work is underway to use minerals to selectively isolate elements that have been deemed 'critical elements' by the Department of Energy. Critical elements are those that are essential for modern technology (such as lithium and the rare earth elements).
Lithium is a promising metal with many applications in the energy industry. However, its extraction is not without environmental problems. The Department of Energy funds me to help develop and characterize new ways of extracting lithium from brine water at geothermal power plants, wastewater at oil field sites, and potentially water from the ocean during desalination. The Lithium removal is simple and doesn't require any input to work, making it a low-energy/low-cost solution to global lithium demand and environmental security.
Biosignatures in Minerals
Astrobiology - Biomineralogy
Finding and characterizing biological signatures in minerals such as halite and epsomite (among other common salts) and to explore ways of finding life on other planets.
On Earth, hypersaline bacteria (bacteria that live in super salt water like at the Great Salt Lake) are trapped in fluid inclusions of the salt as the crystals grow, and can be preserved through deep time. By investigating how to best analyze these minerals, identify the types of bacteria without opening their crystal tomb, it could be possible to determine the bacteria-mineral relationship that allows these creatures to persist for possibly millions and millions of years. This has direct applications for searching and finding life on other planets, because once we know where on Earth to find the oldest living (and tiniest) organisms, this will help inform future NASA mission. Space is a big place, you have to be very specific on what to explore next. This work is in collaboration with NASA-JPL.
Tar and Asphalt Remediation
At the La Brea Tar Pits: Removing the sticky tar and asphalt from recovered bones is a laborious and sometimes toxic process. I'm currently developing ways to use minerals that will take energy from the Sun and breakdown the asphalt into light organic compounds. Once broken down, the material can be used to make carbon fiber, which can then be used for advanced manufacturing. This would result in a near-carbon-neutral process for materials development and remediation.
Environmental Remediation: Besides ongoing work at the Tar Pits, this technique could also be used for oil spill cleanup, road asphalt & roof shingle reclamation, and many other processes that take advantage of photocatalysis.
Not all tar at La Brea is fluid like this. Some are rock-hard which makes them difficult to process by traditional methods.
Prospering Backyards
Building Soil + Community + ART
This reserach project is a community-based initiative of Self-Help Graphics. We studying the use a zeolite (specifically clinoptilolite), to selectively “sieve” lead from the soil. Learn more about this project and the team at the Prospering Backyards website.
Borghese-Windsor Cabinet, now on display at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, CA. Photo from the Getty Museum.
Mineral & Gemstone Origins and Formation
The Getty Museum in Los Angeles recently acquired the Borghese-Windsor Cabinet (shown left), a piece of furniture extensively decorated with agate, lapis lazuli, and other stones presumed to be from the Nahe River Valley neard Idar-Oberstein, Germany. The cabinet is thought to have been built around 1620 for Camillo Borghese (later Pope Paul V). The Sixtus Cabinet, built around 1585 for Pope Sixtus V (born Felice Peretti di Montalto).
By comparing the polished gems on this cabinet to crystals from known locations, we generate new knowledge concerning the origins of specimens on this cabinet, and also in our own collection. This continuing work in mineral research and origin (and not just for quartz) can help determine the geographic of minerals, and if that is known, it can be used to help reduce the spread conflict minerals into the global economy.
Agates (left) are made of silicon dioxide, mostly as the mineral quartz, but also as metastable moganite. Both quartz and moganite will crystallize together as the agate forms, but moganite is not stable at the Earth’s surface and will convert to quartz over millions of years. Thus, older agate contains less moganite. For the agate image on the left, the warm colors show where the moganite is located (from IR-Vis spectra). Visible light image is on the right.
The Potential of New Minerals and Gems
Jasonsmithite
This is an interesting mineral because of its large void spaces within the crystal. The image above shows the empty tunnels (blue is the inside wall of the tunnel). There are bottlenecks in the tunnels, and these provide a possible way to control what ions can move into, and out of, the larger parts of the tunnels. This process is know as shape selective ion exchange, and is an important for environmental waste separation. This mineral was first found at the Foote Mine in North Carolina.
Phoxite
Although not much to look at, the brown crystals are phoxite. This is the first oxalate-phosphate mineral discovered. Phoxite can slowly dissolve in water, making it potentially useful to farmers as a time-released fertilizer (from phosphorous) while simultaneously adding protection from biting insects using the oxalate supplied to the plants. This mineral was first found at the Rowley Mine in Arizona.
Aaron Celestian, Ph.D.
Curator of Mineral Sciences at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Affl. Research Scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Adj. Associate Professor of Earth Science at the University of Southern California
Adj. Professor of Sciences at West Los Angeles College