Professor Vervoort is a leading expert in radiogenic isotope geochemistry and geochronology and has been among the pioneers in applying these tools to understanding the early Earth. Dr. Vervoort received his Ph.D. from Cornell University (USA) in 1994 and was a research scientist at the University of Arizona for several years before joining the faculty of Geology at Washington State University in 2002. He became full professor in 2013 and is director of the Radiogenic Isotope and Geochronology Laboratory (RIGL) at Washington State University (USA). Vervoort has been a visiting Professor at Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, (9 months), Université Grenoble Alpes (1 month), Aarhus University, Denmark (4 months), University of Western Australia (3 months), and the Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris (2 months). Professor Vervoort has published 185 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters spanning a wide range of topics in isotope geochemistry and geochronology. These papers have been cited over 21,000 times with an H-index of 63 (Google Scholar). He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America and has held 25 research and equipment grants from the US National Science Foundation.
"In my research, I use the Hf and Nd isotope record of the early Earth to help better understand its early differentiation and how this relates to the formation and evolution of Earth’s earliest continental crust. A recent focus of my work is on the integrity of that isotope record: to what extent it has been modified by subsequent metamorphic events and how we can assess whether it faithfully records original isotope compositions. To answer these questions, I use coupled U-Pb age and Hf isotope analyses of zircon and U-Pb age and Nd isotope analyses of REE-rich phases (monazite, titanite, allanite, etc.) determined simultaneously by the laser ablation split-stream (LASS) method. Our research indicates that the formation of long-lived continental crust and corresponding depletion of the mantle did not occur significantly until after about 3.8 Ga."