I was born to a French-Armenian family of teachers living in the suburbs of Paris. I was accepted to UCB PhD program in Earth and Planetary Science for the Fall semester of 2017.
Complex interactions between different parts of Earth’s mantle — 3000 km of solid rock beneath our feet — push and pull tectonic plates through mantle convection where hot rock rises and cold rock sinks on timescales of 10s-100s millions of years. To understand processes at the surface, particularly earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, a deeper and wider understanding of Earth’s force balance must be obtained. My project team will use a combined approach of a theoretical framework and numerical modeling in order to retrieve a density model for the deep mantle, which is one of the missing pieces of the global mantle circulation that governs most of the surface tectonic processes.