Robert Hazen

His parents were Peggy Hazen (née Dorothy Ellen Chapin; 1918–2002) and Dan Hazen (né Daniel Francis Hazen, Jr.; 1918–2016).

He spent his early childhood in Cleveland, near a fossil quarry where he collected his first trilobite at the age of about 9.

The Hazen family moved to New Jersey, where Robert's eight-grade teacher, Bill Welsh, observed Robert's interest in his collection of minerals.

Hazen later recalled "He gave me a starter collection of 100 specimens, mineral field guides, and mimeographed directions to Paterson and Franklin, New Jersey."

Hazen also had an early interest in music, starting with the piano at age 5, the violin at 6 and the trumpet at age 9.

Robert Miller Hazen (born November 1, 1948) is an American mineralogist and astrobiologist.

He is a research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Geophysical Laboratory and Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University, in the United States.

Hazen is the Executive Director of the Deep Carbon Observatory.

Hazen was born in Rockville Centre, New York, on November 1, 1948.

Although the field had pioneering contributions from the Nobel Prize winner Percy Bridgman and a student of his, Francis Birch, in the early- to mid-20th century, it did not have a name until the 1960s, and in the 1970s some scientists were concerned that a more interdisciplinary approach was needed to understand the relationship between interatomic forces and mineral properties.

Hazen worked on his B.S. and S.M. (Master of Science) in Earth Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1971.

He started with the intention of going into chemical engineering, but he was captivated by the enthusiasm of David Wones and converted to mineralogy.

With Wones as advisor, he completed a masters thesis on cation substitution in trioctahedral micas; his publication in American Mineralogist was his first to be highly cited.

He completed a Ph.D. in Mineralogy & Crystallography at Harvard University in 1975.

His thesis, with Charles Burnham as advisor, involved learning how to use a 4-circle diffractometer to do high-pressure X-ray crystallography and applying it to olivine.

This became a focus of his early career.

While a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at Cambridge University in England, Hazen worked with Charles Prewitt to determine empirical relations for the effect of temperature and pressure on interatomic distances in oxides and silicates.

In 1976, Hazen joined the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory as a research associate.

After a brief stint measuring optical properties of lunar minerals with Peter Bell and David Mao, he started to do X-ray crystallography with Larry Finger.

He later recalled, "It was a match made in mineralogical heaven: Larry loved to write code, build machines, and analyze data; I loved to mount crystals, run the diffractometers, and write papers."

Hazen and Prewitt co-convened the first mineral physics conference; it was held on October 17–19, 1977 at the Airlie House in Warrenton, Virginia.

Cooled to very low temperatures, some materials experience a sudden transition where electrical resistance drops to zero and any magnetic fields are expelled.

This phenomenon is called superconductivity.

Superconductors have a host of applications including powerful electromagnets, fast digital circuits and sensitive magnetometers, but the very low temperatures needed make the applications more difficult and expensive.

Until the 1980s, no superconductors existed above 21 K. Then in 1986 two IBM researchers, Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller, found a ceramic material with a critical temperature of 35 K. This set off a frenzied search for higher critical temperatures.

A group led by Paul Chu at the University of Houston explored some materials made of yttrium, barium, copper and oxygen (YCBO) and were the first to obtain a critical temperature above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen.

The YCBO samples had a mixture of black and green minerals, and although the researchers knew the average composition, they did not know the compositions of the two phases.

They collaborated for two decades and determined about a thousand crystal structures at variable pressures and temperatures, work summarized in their 1982 book Comparative Crystal Chemistry.

Much of the work that Hazen was doing could be classified as mineral physics, a cross between geophysics and mineralogy.

In February 1987, Chu turned to Mao and Hazen, because they could determine the composition of small mineral grains in rocks.

It took Mao and Hazen a week to determine the compositions; the black phase, which turned out to be the superconductor, was YBa2Cu3O7−δ.

Mao and Hazen determined that the crystal structure of the superconducting phase was like that of perovskite, an important mineral in Earth's mantle.

Subsequently, Hazen's group identified twelve more high-temperature oxide superconductors, all with perovskite structures, and worked on organic superconductors.

By the mid-1990s, Hazen felt that his research had reached a "respectable plateau" where the main principles of how crystals compress were known.

The questions he was asking were increasingly narrow and the answers rarely surprising.

So he changed research directions to study life's chemical origins.

This opportunity came when a colleague at George Mason University, Harold Morowitz, realized that the temperature and pressure at a hydrothermal vent might change the properties of water, allowing chemical reactions that ordinarily require the help of an enzyme.

Enlisting the help of Hatten Yoder, a specialist in high pressure mineralogy, they tried subjecting pyruvate in water to high pressure, hoping for a simple reaction that would return oxaloacetate.

Instead, an analysis by an organic geochemist, George Cody, found that they obtained tens of thousands of molecules.

The publication of their results, which seemed to support the deep sea vent hypothesis, met with heavy criticism, especially from Stanley Miller and colleagues who believe that life emerged on the surface.