Nicolas Dauphas

Dauphas founded the Origins Laboratory in 2004 to examine questions pertaining to the origins of Earth’s atmosphere and what meteorites reveal about the formation of planets, asteroids and comets. To address these questions, Dauphas analyzes chemical elements and their isotopes, which exhibit subtle compositional variations. His research has included an examination of how the rapid formation of Mars accounts for its small size, and the discovery of microscopic remnants in a meteorite of a nearby star that exploded approximately 4.5 billion years ago. He has received the American Geophysical Union’s Macelwane Medal, the European Association for Geochemistry’s Houtermans Medal, a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, and the Meteoritical Society’s Nier Prize.