Bio:
Dr. Paula Antoshechkina is a Senior Research Scientist at Caltech, Pasadena, CA. She joined the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences as a postdoc in 2003. Previously she was at the University of Cambridge, UK, and was awarded a BA in Geological Sciences in 1996, and a PhD in 2001. Her thesis project on the geochemistry and geophysics of continental rifting evolved into work in computational thermodynamics and experimental petrology. At Caltech she is the main developer of alphaMELTS, a flexible text-based interface to the (rhyolite-) MELTS, pMELTS, and pHMELTS algorithms, including a trace element engine. Paula is responsible for the MAGMA@Caltech website (magmasource.caltech.edu), which hosts the MELTS Software She has been building and supporting the Linux versions of Mark Ghiorso’s rhyolite-MELTS graphical user interface since 2009. She also runs the MELTS Facebook page, and helps with all MELTS software, including alphaMELTS, the GUI, MELTS for Excel, etc. She works closely with MCS Programmer Guy Brown especially in MCS PC development and thermodynamics of open systems with MCS team member Frank Spera.
Research:
Paula’s current focus is improving the activity-composition relations in phases underlying the MELTS family of models for thermodynamic equilibrium in silicate systems. As part of Paul Asimow’s research group at Caltech she is working to expand the amphibole solid solution model, which is of particular relevance to MCS, and to add CO2 to the pMELTS system. She is Co-PI on a collaborative research proposal that came out of the data management component of these and other calibration efforts. The project, which is part of NSF’s EarthCube initiative, starts in September 2020, and seeks to integrate data resources at EarthChem (www.earthchem.org) with the modeling capabilities of the ENKI software framework (enki-portal.org). The hope is that these capabilities will eventually include EC-RAFC family models like the open system MCS tool.