William

Palfey

William Palfey is a mineralogist who is interested in hydrogen incorporation in minerals and their synthetic analogues, with applications to planetary interior modeling and novel materials development. He joins Carnegie from Caltech, where his PhD and postdoctoral work focused on characterizing hydrogen’s structural state in oxides through density functional theory (DFT) calculations, infrared spectroscopy, and solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. In particular, he used these techniques to study oxyhydrides, an unusual and poorly understood class of materials.

At Carnegie, he will be investigating hydrogen-bearing molecular systems at elevated pressures with Dr. Alexander Goncharov, in conjunction with Prof. Mohammad Mahmood at Howard University.