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Dr. Hao, Jihua （郝记华 博士）

Jihua Hao was born as the second child of the family in a small village of Liaocheng, Shandong Province, China. His childhood as a shepherd led him to the close observations of wild life and environment. His father, as once a talent in chemistry in the high school and later his teacher in the primary school, further developed his interests in natural science, especially chemistry. After three-year (2005-2008) high school study in Shenxian No. 1 Middle School, Jihua got enrolled into in Dept. Geochemistry & Environmental Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). During his undergraduate program, he obtained knowledge of geology, chemistry, and biology, and identified his research interests in the evolution of the Earth system under the influence of Prof. Xiaodong Liu, Dr. Xin Zhou, and Prof. Liguang Sun. His undergraduate research projects and thesis were about reconstruction of paleoenvironment and extreme events using sedimentary records from islands and shallow marine.

In Aug 2012, he was enrolled in the Dept. Earth & Planetary Sciences, Johns Hopkins University for the PhD study in Geochemistry under supervision of Prof. Dimitri A. Sverjensky. His PhD program investigated thermodynamic modeling of weathering and riverine transport on the Archean Earth. He also calculated the speciation and mobility of trace elements (e.g., Cr) under ambient and high T-P conditions. Since June 2013, the researcher started conducting batch adsorption and hydrothermal experiments as a visiting student and later Predoctoral Fellow (2014 summer- 2016) in Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington (GL-CIW) with Dr. Robert M. Hazen as the mentor. He performed both experimental study and theoretical simulations covering several topics related with origin of life, e.g., surface adsorption of amino acids on mineral surfaces at ambient systems, and stability of amino acids at hydrothermal systems. During the PhD study, both Dimitri and Bob also inspired Jihua's interests in the mineral evolution/ecology studies, and using big data to explore geological and geobiological problems (Keck DTDI project). In GL, he was trained by Dr. George D. Codyand Dr. Dionysis I. Foustoukos for hydrothermal experimental techniques. In November 29, 2016, he finished his PhD with the thesis entitled "Geochemical Signatures of Weathering and Surface Water Chemistry in the Late Archean".

Since December 2016, Jihua joined Laboratoire de géologie de Lyon, Université Claude Bernard Lyon1 as a postdoctoral fellow under the supervision of Prof. Isabelle Daniel. His research will focus on the role of mineral surfaces in the origin of life studies (PREBIOM project).