Short History
My name is David Davis. I was born in Keflavik, Iceland, and raised in Merced, California. I graduated from Georgia State University this spring with a B.S. in geology. While at GSU I was part of a research group that has been participating in the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP). My work focused on trying to identify the links between climate and tectonic changes and how they may have influenced human evolution by analyzing the clays and zeolites from paleolake beds in the East African Rift Valley. During the 2017 and 2018 summers I worked at WHOI, analyzing vanadium isotopes in Martian achondrites and carbonaceous chondrites and eucrites from 4 Vesta. The purpose of this research was to characterize the irradiation history of the early solar system, but also to investigate the production of vanadium in our solar system and to understand how the Earth formed.
Research Interest
I am now an incoming PhD student and I’ll be working with Yair. For now, my project will be studying the Earth’s marine and atmospheric iodine cycle. I am curious to know if I can use oceanographic methods and the stable isotopes of iodine to elucidate whether Earth’s marine-atmospheric iodine cycle is a detectable biosignature and if it is, can I use that data to assess the habitability of other planets and ocean worlds such as Europa, Enceladus, and maybe Mars.