**Contents**




Reprinted from: *Minerals* **2020**, *10*, 261, doi:10.3390/min10030261 .................. **400**



## **About the Special Issue Editor**

**Robert Cooper Liebermann** As an undergraduate student at Caltech in the early 1960s, I spent most of my time playing intercollegiate football and indulging in student body politics. However, in my senior year, I was fortunate to take a seminar reading course in geophysics led by Don Anderson, who introduced me to studies of the deep interior of the Earth.

In my early days as a seismology graduate student at Columbia University, I conducted research at the Lamont Geological Observatory on techniques to study the relative excitation of surface waves by earthquakes and underground nuclear explosions. In 1965, Orson Anderson joined the geology faculty at Columbia and was looking for prospective graduate students. I began to work with Orson and his research colleague Ed Schreiber, using the techniques of ultrasonic interferometry to measure sound velocities in minerals at elevated pressures and temperatures (in those days, to 0.7 GPa and 200 ◦C); the research activities of their laboratory are described in "The Orson Anderson Era of Mineral Physics at Lamont in the 1960s" in this volume. I have continued to use such techniques for the remainder of my career at the Australian National University (see "The Birth of Mineral Physics at the ANU in the 1970s") and at Stony Brook University (see "My Career as a Mineral Physicist at Stony Brook: 1976–2019" in this volume); see also Liebermann, R. C., "The Role of Serendipity in My Career in Mineral Physics: 1968 to 2013", *Phys. Earth Planet. Interiors* **2014**, *228*, 307–323.

In 1976, I took up a faculty position at the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook University. Over the next half a century, in collaboration with graduate students from the U. S., China and Russia, and postdoctoral colleagues from Australia, France and Japan, I pursued studies related to the elastic properties of minerals (and their structural analogues) at high pressures and temperatures. In the 1980s, together with Donald Weidner (Director of the Mineral Physics Institute), I established the Stony Brook High Pressure Laboratory, and established the first modern multi-anvil, high-pressure laboratory in North America, using apparatus imported from Japan. With these facilities, we were able to achieve pressure in excess of 20 GPa and simultaneous temperatures above 2000 ◦C (see also Liebermann, R. C., "Multi-anvil, high-pressure apparatus: A half century of development and progress", *High Pressure Research* **2011**, *31*, 493–532). In 1991, in collaboration with Alexandra Navrotsky at Princeton University and Charles Prewitt at the Geophysical Laboratory, I founded the NSF Science and Technology Center for High Pressure Research. In 2003, I served as President of COMPRES: Consortium for Mineral Physics Research in Earth Sciences. I formally retired in 2014 and have spent the ensuing years watching over the research projects of my Stony Brook colleague Professor Baosheng Li and writing articles on the history of mineral physics.

In collaboration with Professor Lars Ehm at Stony Brook and Gabriel Gwanmesia from Delaware State University, I have created a diversity program called "A Career Path for African-American Students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities to National Laboratories". This initiative teaches marketable skills, places students in internships, and fosters the professional career tracks of underrepresented minorities. It has been supported by a new program called "Opportunities for Enhancing Diversity in the Geosciences of the NSF" (EOS, *Earth and Space Sciences News* **2016**, *97*, 9–11).
