Sébastien Merkel is the French PI. He is a professor of physics at the Université de Lille, in the laboratory called Unité Matériaux et Transformations. His research focuses on understanding the dynamics and formation of the deeper portions of the Earth. He performs experiments under the pressure and temperature of the Earth’s interior to study microstructures in polycrystals, their mechanical behaviour, and their relation to phase transformations. He then integrates the experimental results into polycrystal numerical models to understand wave propagation through complex microstructures and compare the results of these models to seismic observations. This work aims at understanding the dynamics and formation of the Earth’s mantle and inner core.

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