ERL is excited to welcome Dr. Ben Holtzman as Senior Research Scientist in ERL and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric an Planetary Sciences at MIT. Dr. Holtzman studies the mechanical behavior of rocks, with a broad range of applications, including how magmas move through the planet’s interior to feed volcanoes, how seismic waves move through the deep Earth, and how earthquakes occur. He also works on deep geothermal heat mining– finding new ways to access the Earth’s internal heat to generate electricity without producing greenhouse gases.
Dr. Holtzman has been working with ERL as a Visiting Scientist since 2021 and is now taking on a more permanent role in our community. He joins MIT from the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, where he served since 2004 as the Lamont Research Professor in Seismology, Geology and Tectonophysics. At Columbia he also founded the Seismic Sound Lab and served as Scientist-in-Residence at the Computer Music Center. He received his Ph.D. in Geophysics at the University of Minnesota.