Profile of the Week

Dr. Mark Baskaran is a tenured full-time professor and chair in the Department of Geology at Wayne State University (Detroit, Michigan). He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), a premier research institution in India. Professor Mark Baskaran has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles (with over 8000 Google Scholar cumulative citations, h-index 54 in May 2020), most of which are related to the applications of isotopes as tracers and chronometers in Earth systems. He edited a two-volume Handbook entitled “Handbook of Environmental Isotope Geochemistry” with forty articles contributed by eminent scholars in the field in 2011, published by Springer. He also published a monograph on radon entitled "Radon: A Tracer for Geological, Geophysical and Geochemical Studies"--Springer 2016. He spent three months as a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Ege University (Izmir, Turkey) in 2015. He has given invited and plenary talks/seminars at over sixty national/international conferences, workshops, universities and research institutions around the world. He serves as an Associate Editor for two Elsevier journals, Journal of Environmental Radioactivity and Estuarine, Coastal, and Shelf Science. Dr. Baskaran’s research work includes all subsystems of the Earth system. He has extensively collaborated with a large number of researchers from universities and institutions around the world. His work with marine systems (estuarine, coastal, shelf and open-ocean) on the investigations of particular organic carbon export, particle cycling and remineralization and colloidal thorium scavenging in the Arctic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, North Atlantic and East Pacific were funded by several funding agencies in the U.S. that include the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Department of Energy (DOE). He has been funded by NSF as a part of the U.S. GEOTRACES group in four phases (Intercalibration, North Atlantic, East Pacific and Western Arctic Ocean sections). He has served as a Chief Scientist in six major oceanographic expeditions in the Gulf of Mexico and Arctic Ocean. Currently, he serves as the inaugural Chair (2017-2021) of the Devendra Lal Memorial Medal Selection Committee, a union-level award at the American Geophysical Union. He also serves a member of the National Fulbright Screening Committee..