Shaunna M Morrison

Brief Bio:

Shaunna M. Morrison is a mineralogist and planetary scientist with expertise in crystallography, crystal chemistry, and the application of data driven techniques. Morrison is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University. She is a Co-Investigator of the CheMin X-ray diffraction instrument on the NASA Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, a Co-PI of the NSF funded OneMineralogy Project, Co-I of the NASA ICAR Advancing Multi-Messenger Biosignature Techniques With Machine Learning, a collaborator on the NASA Astrobiology ENIGMA Project, and a data contributor and collaborator of the RRUFF Project, including the Mineral Evolution Database (MED), Mineral Properties Database (MPD), and the Evolutionary System of Mineralogy Database (ESMD). Prof Morrison was formerly the Co-director of the 4D (Deep Time Data Driven Discovery) Initiative at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Earth and Planets Laboratory, Project Manager of the Carnegie led Deep-Time Data Infrastructure (DTDI),  and Co-Investigator of the NASA Astromaterials Data System. 

Prof Morrison builds on her technical and theoretical background in crystallography, crystal chemistry, and martian mineralogy, to explore new techniques in multidimensional, multivariate analysis and visualization by employing a range of advanced analytics and machine learning techniques to better understand the complex relationships among Earth and planetary materials, their formational environments through deep time, and their coevolution with the biosphere, including identifying and characterizing mineralogical signs of life. 

Research Interests

• Mineralogical signs of life

• Data-driven approaches to characterizing the coevolution of the geosphere and biosphere

• Applications of advanced analytics to Earth and planetary systems, with a particular emphasis in mineral relationships 

• Martian mineralogy via surface missions (CheMin, NASA MSL) and meteorites

• Crystal chemical behavior and bonding systematics in minerals