Alexandra Navrotsky

Alexandra Navrotsky (born 20 June 1943 in New York City) is a physical chemist in the field of nanogeoscience. She is an elected member of the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the American Philosophical Society (APS). She was a board member of the Earth Sciences and Resources division of the NAS from 1995 until 2000.
In 2005, she was awarded the Urey Medal, by the European Association of Geochemistry.
In 2006, she was awarded the Harry H. Hess Medal, by the American Geophysical Union.
She is currently the director of NEAT ORU (Nanomaterials in Environment, Agriculture, and Technology Organized Research Unit), a primary program in nanogeoscience. She is Distinguished Professor at University of California, Davis.
Early life and education.
She graduated from Bronx High School of Science in New York. She received B.S. (1963), M.S. (1964), and Ph.D. (1967) in physical chemistry from University of Chicago, where she studied with Professor Ole J. Kleppa.
Career and research.
In 1967, she went to Germany for postdoctoral work. She came back to the U.S. in 1968 and continued her postdoctoral work at Pennsylvania State University. Then she joined the Chemistry faculty at Arizona State University, for approximately five consecutive years. Later on, she moved to the Department of Geological and Geophysical Sciences at Princeton University in 1985. She became the chair of that department from 1988 to 1991. In 1997, she moved to University of California at Davis and became an Interdisciplinary Professor of Ceramic, Earth, and Environmental Materials Chemistry. In 2001, she was chosen as the Edward Roessler Chair in Mathematical and Physical Sciences. As of 2013, she was appointed interim dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences in the College of Letters and Sciences, at University of California at Davis. Her specializations include: Solid-state chemistry, Ceramics, Physics and Chemistry of Minerals, Geochemistry.
Geochemistry.
Since 1997, she has built a unique high temperature calorimetry facility. She has also designed and enhanced the instrumentation. Navrotsky introduced and applied the method for measuring the energetics of crystalline oxides of glasses, amorphous, nanophase material, porous materials of hydrous phases and carbonates also more recently nitrides and oxynitrides. Obtaining the thermo chemical data is used to understand the compatibility and reactivity of materials in technological and geological application. The energetics provides insight into chemical bonding, order-disorder reactions, and phase transitions.
Navrotsky's calorimetry has also been used in providing thermo chemical data for a variety of perovskite-related phases which has major consequences for convection and evolution on a planetary scale.
One of Navrotsky's works has shown that many zeolitic and mesoporous phases have energies only slightly higher than those of their stable dense polymorphs. The energy is associated with the presence or absence of strained bond angles not with the density.
Nanomaterials.
Her research is mainly focused on the structure and the stability of both natural and synthetic nanomaterials along with their dependence of temperature and pressure. She is also looking into the application of nanomaterials in geochemical pollutant transport in the air as it relates to the global climate change.