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David Bell grew up on
the banks of the Diep River Estuary, near Cape Town. Regular forays into the
mountains of the Western Cape and the
deserts of Namaqualand forged a life-long
interest in the diversity and inter-connected workings of Nature. He majored
in Chemistry, Zoology and Geology at the University of Cape Town,
completing his B.Sc. (Hons) in Geology in 1981. After military service and
two years of valuable experience in the diamond exploration industry, he
migrated to the USA
for postgraduate study. Performing spectro-scopic and high pressure
experimental studies of hydrogen in mantle minerals under Professor George
Rossman, he earned a Ph.D. in Geochemistry from the California Institute of
Technology in 1993. After four years of postdoctoral research at the Carnegie
Institute of Washington Geophysical Lab, he joined the Kimberlite Research
Group at UCT as a research fellow, where he managed the research and academic
affairs of the group, teaching and supervising honours and postgraduate students.
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David
Bell
drbell@asu.edu
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In 2001 he returned
to the USA as the Crosby
visiting scholar in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary
Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is currently
Associate Research Scientist at Arizona
State University
in Tempe. His
research is built around detailed observations on the minerals and rocks of
the continental upper mantle, and on the kimberlites that transport these
samples from Earth's deep interior to the surface. By studying the
petrographic, mineralogical, elemental and isotopic compositions of these
rocks and relating them to both atomistic material properties and to
geophysical and geological studies of the lithosphere, his goals are to piece
together the geologic history of lithospheric mantle, and to decipher the
record contained therein of evolving global geochemical cycles. In addition
to studies of mantle processes (e.g., the origin of diamonds), his
investigations into the behavior of H and C on the Earth through time include
studying the concentration and isotopic composition of volatiles in volcanic
rocks, global reservoirs and extraterrestrial systems.
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