Brian Savage arrived in July to begin his term as Harry Oscar Wood Fellow at DTM. Seismologist Savage, who received his Ph.D. from Caltech, will continue adapting two-and three-dimensional wave propagation codes to infer crust and mantle structure from seismic waveforms of regional and teleseismic earthquakes. His prior work focused on the southern California region. At DTM he will be expanding his research to new areas, with data from the department’s networks of portable broadband seismometers.

Mercedes López-Morales arrived in July to begin her postdoctoral fellowship. López-Morales, who received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will be continuing her studies of stars below one solar mass. As the most abundant stellar type, these objects are among the most likely to host Earth-like planets. In addition, López-Morales will apply her experience with robotic astronomical instrumentation to construct two new 32-inch robotic telescopes at Las Campanas and in Arizona. The mission of these two telescopes will be to monitor the photometric stability of the 2000 nearby stars that are currently being searched for extrasolar planets. The telescopes will be also able to detect planetary transits of those stars.

DTM postdoctoral fellow Lucy Flesch gave birth to her second child, Charlie, on 15 July at Georgetown University Hospital. Lucy and her husband, DTM predoctoral fellow Saad Haq, along with their daughter Ellie, happily welcomed the new addition to their family.

Postdoctoral fellow Ambre Luguet departed DTM in July to begin a new position as a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Durham, UK. At Durham she will continue to study sulfides and platinum-group metal abundances in mantle rocks exposed along submarine fracture zones.

Mark Behn, a postdoctoral fellow in the seismology group, departed DTM in July to begin an Assistant Scientist position in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Behn’s wife, Elizabeth Kujawinski, formerly an assistant professor at Barnard College, also accepted a position at WHOI and the pair is in the process of settling into their new home.