Jerry X. Mitrovica

Biosketch

Jerry X. Mitrovica is the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. His work has focused on the structure and evolution of the Earth, with particular interest in studies at the (understudied) interface of solid Earth geophysics and climate. He was born in Melbourne, Australia, and – to sample another hemisphere – moved with his tight-knit Albanian family to Canada as a young boy. He received an undergraduate degree in Engineering Science and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Physics, all at the University of Toronto. After a post-doctoral appointment at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, he returned to the University of Toronto as a faculty member in the Department of Physics where he eventually held the J. Tuzo Wilson Professorship. He has been at Harvard since 2009 and is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America, a former Fellow of the MacArthur and Guggenheim Foundations, and an international member of the National Academy of Sciences. Awards include the Arthur L. Day Prize, Arthur L. Day Medal, W. S. Jardetzky Medal, Augustus Love Medal, Steacie Prize and Rutherford Memorial Medal.

Research Interests

The unifying theme of Mitrovica’s research is sea level change and in particular physical processes responsible for its often enigmatic geographic variability, and his tools involve theoretical work, numerical modeling and data analysis. His earliest work considered vertical motions of continents across geological time driven by solid state convection within the Earth’s mantle, a process now termed “dynamic topography”, that are reflected in the stratigraphic record of continental flooding and reemergence. This work ultimately broadened to consider global scale sea level change on ice age times scales, with a focus on critical events in Earth’s paleoclimate, as well as modern sea level "fingerprints" in a progressively warming world. Additionally, all these studies have been advanced with parallel research on Earth’s internal viscoelastic structure, Earth rotation changes, and interdisciplinary research at the interface between sea level change, ice sheet stability, landscape evolution, and orbital dynamics.