Draft:Stephen James Mojzsis

Stephen James Mojzsis (born June 21, 1965) is an American planetary scientist, geochemist, solid-state physicist and physical chemist interested in the origin and evolution of rocky planets and the origin of life. He currently works as Research Professor at the Konkoly Observatory of the HUN-REN Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences in Budapest, Hungary. He is also Honorary Professor at the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) and is a Corresponding (Full) Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

A significant part of his research in the past few years concerns using geochemical and cosmochemical tracers from planetary materials and meteorites to make sense of the dynamical evolution of planetary orbits, particularly for understanding the early history of the Solar System. In the last decade he has been deeply engaged in exoplanet studies, with particular emphasis on exoplanet interiors explicated by Galactic chemical evolution and nuclear astrophysics as well as Stellar spectroscopy. Mojzsis has proposed that there be a new field of transdisciplinary science that unites geology with astronomy to create what he has termed Geoastronomy. This new field will grow in importance in the coming century as more exoplanet detections occur that require quantitative explanation.

Mojzsis was Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Department of Geological Sciences from 2000-2021, where he achieved the rank of Full Professor in 2017. He was director of the Collaborative for Research in Origins (CRiO) before moving the Europe in 2021.

Prior to that, he was a University of California President's Postdoctoral Scholar as well as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California Los Angeles Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the W.M. Keck Foundation National Ion Microprobe Center. While there, he worked with the renowned isotope geochemist T. Mark Harrison, the cosmochemist/meteoriticist Kevin D. McKeegan and geologist Craig E. Manning on topics of Abiogenesis, the origin of the oceans, the Great Oxidation Event and numerous aspects of zircon geochronology and stable isotope geochemistry applied to the world's oldest rocks and minerals, as well as to meteorites.