Anne Pommier's research is dedicated to understanding how terrestrial planets work, especially the role of silicate and metallic melts in planetary interiors, from the scale of volcanic magma reservoirs to core-scale and planetary-scale processes.
She joined Carnegie in July 2021 from U.C. San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she investigated the evolution and structure of planetary interiors, including our own Earth and its Moon, as well as Mars, Mercury, and the moon Ganymede.
Pommier’s experimental petrology and mineral physics work are an excellent addition to Carnegie’s longstanding leadership in lab-based mimicry of the conditions found deep inside Earth and other rocky planets. She uses high-pressure, high-temperature laboratory techniques to understand the role of molten material in planetary interiors over deep time—from the full-scale magma oceans that played a crucial role in Earth’s evolution to the formation of our planet’s core and the magma reservoirs that lurk under active volcanoes. She collaborates regularly with geophysicists, planetary scientists, geodynamicists, and field petrologists to better interpret her laboratory data, in particular the electrical properties of silicates and metals, and constrain the questions she is probing in her research.
Pommier received her Ph.D. in experimental petrology from the University of Orléans in France and an engineering degree from Polytech'Orléans. She did her undergraduate work in volcanology at Polytech'Orléans and the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Palermo, Italy. She is leaving a tenured position as an associate professor at Scripps and has also served as an adjunct professor at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a visiting scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, and in postdoctoral positions at Arizona State University and MIT.
