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Nicolas Dauphas is a French-American planetary scientist and isotope geochemist. He is a professor of geochemistry and cosmochemistry in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences & Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the origin and evolution of planets and other objects in the solar system, through investigating the natural distributions of elements and their isotopes using mass spectrometers.

Career
Born in Nantes, Brittany, France, Dauphas received a B.Sc. degree from École Nationale Supérieure de Géologie in Nancy, France in 1998. He obtained a Ph.D. in geochemistry and cosmochemistry from Institut National Polytechnique de Lorraine in 2002, working with Bernard Marty and Laurie Reisberg. He then completed his postdoctoral research at the Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History from 2002 to 2004, before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago in 2004. In 2016, he was awarded Louis Block professorship.

In 2005, Dauphas was awarded Nier Prize of the Meteoritical Society which recognizes outstanding research in meteoritics and closely allied fields by young scientists. In 2007, he was awarded the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship, given to nationwide, most promising early-career scientists and engineers. He won the 2008 Houtermans Award, given by the European Association of Geochemistry for outstanding contributions to geochemistry. He was awarded the James B. Macelwane Medal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) for “significant contributions to the geophysical sciences”, and was selected as an AGU Fellow in 2011. In 2014, he became a Fellow of the Meteoritical Society. He was one of the finalists of 2017 Blavatnik National Awards. In 2019, he was selected as a Geochemical Fellow of the Geochemical Society and European Association of Geochemistry.

Dauphas was selected as a member of the Mars Sample Return Campaign Science Group in 2022.

Research
Dauphas’ contributions to geochemistry and cosmochemistry are recognized for their breadth and depth, covering processes at various scales and times. His most influential work includes but not limited to:


 * Calculated the age of the Milkly Way to be 14.5 billion years, based on the ratio of 238U to 232Th in meteorites and galactic halo stars.
 * Discovered nucleosynthetic isotopic anomalies of Molybdenum in meteorites.
 * Discovered that the long-sought but elusive carries of 54Cr anomalies in the solar system are Cr-rich nanoparticles from supernovae. The discovery of this new type of presolar grain solved a 20-year-old problem.
 * Demonstrated the low level of 60Fe in the solar system, suggesting that the Sun might be born in the shell of a Wolf-Rayet bubble.
 * Established the rapid formation timescale of Mars (~4 million years) and showed that it was a stranded planetary embryo.
 * Established that the Moon has very similar isotopic composition to the Earth, which is difficult to explain in the context of the Giant-impact hypothesis, a problem that is now known as the lunar isotopic crisis.
 * Developed the Sciphon software, which is a data analysis software for nuclear resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (NRIXS) that facilitates determination of equilibrium isotope fractionation factors.
 * Revealed (using Ti isotopes) that Earth had a felsic crust for most of the geological time (as early as 3.5 billion years ago), in contrast to the long-standing perception that Earth’s crust evolved from mafic to felsic, pointing to an early start of modern-style plate tectonics.
 * Constrained the nature of Earth’s accreting materials through time based on isotopes of multiple elements, showing that the materials formed Earth are from an isotopically homogeneous reservoir.