Dr. Philippe Claeys is a geologist, planetary scientist, geochemist interested in documenting global changes and in particular the consequences of asteroid and comet impacts on the evolution of the bio-geosphere. He obtained his PhD in 1993 from the University of California at Davis working on the discovery of the Chicxulub crater in Yucatan, the most likely cause of the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago. He then carried out postdoctoral research at UCLA, before becoming a researcher at UC Berkeley for several years. In the late nineties, he joined the Museum of Natural History in Berlin as chief scientist in charge of establishing and managing the new analytical laboratories. Since 2001, he is a professor at the “Vrije Universiteit Brussel” in Brussels, Belgium, where he currently heads the research unit Analytical-Environmental and Geochemistry. He is also a visiting professor at Ghent University, the Catholic University Leuven and the University of Liège. In 2016-2017 he was a visiting professor and International Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia. When he is not travelling looking for clues to better understand the 4.5 billion years of evolution of planet Earth, he enjoys working in the lab with PhD students and postdocs on a wide variety of projects ranging from Antarctic meteorites, to paleoclimate, or archaeometry and urban water management.

Website: http://we.vub.ac.be/en/philippe-claeys

• Planetary science, impact processes, meteorites
• Paleo-environmental reconstruction, paleoclimate, mass extinctions
• Geochemistry isotopes and trace elements - Biogeochemistry
• Sedimentology, stratigraphy
• Cyclostratrigraphy - Astrochronoloy
• Astrobiology, exobiology
• Urban Water management
• Geoarcheology - Bioarchaeology
• Analytical methodology