Who are we?
The Experimental Petrology Rice Team (ExPeRT) is a research group within the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences (EEPS) at Rice University in Houston, TX. (Find our location at the bottom of this page).
We are a fairly new group, operating since 2009, under the direction of Principal Investigator (PI) and Professor Rajdeep Dasgupta, who oversees the research projects of several undergraduates, graduates, and post-doctorates, with the help of his laboratory staff.
To learn more about the past and present Team, please click here, or take a look at some photographs of the Team in our ExPeRT gallery here.
The Experimental Petrology Rice Team (ExPeRT), as our name suggests, chiefly uses tools and trades of experimental petrology research to answer questions about the fundamental properties and processes of Earth and other planetary bodies.
Petrology means the study of rocks. Experimental means we use various laboratory tools to mimic the conditions that create, alter, and melt rocks in nature underground, that are not directly accessible.
Our current facilities allow us to explore the geochemical reactions of rocks and magmas between 15 and 400 km depth within the Earth and temperatures up to 2200 degrees Celsius or over 3000 degrees Fahrenheit! In this way we can investigate how plate movement produces volcanoes and create new land masses, track how elements like carbon or sulfur cycle through the Earth and into the atmosphere, and discern just how and from what building blocks planets form and evolve that make them unique.
To learn more about our previous and active research, please click here, read some of our publications here, or explore some images and figures related to our work here. You can also follow some of the news items about our research.
To learn more about our previous and active research please click here, read some of our publications here, or explore some images and figures related to our work here. You can also follow some of the news items about our research here.
