Prof. Dietmar Müller from the University of Sydney, Australia, arrived as a Mercator Visiting Professor

From January to August 2010 Prof. Dietmar Müller from the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney, Australia, is Mercator Visiting Professor (funded by the DFG) in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at LMU.  His host is Prof. Hans-Peter Bunge. His research interests include plate tectonics, geodynamics, continental margin evolution, marine geology and geophysics, deep Earth natural resources, and paleoclimate. Prof. Müller's EarthByte Group (www.earthbyte.org) is known for pursuing open innovation, involving the collaborative development of open-source software as well as global digital data sets made available under a creative commons license. One of the fundamental aims of the EarthByte Group is geodata synthesis through space and time, assimilating the wealth of disparate geological and geophysical data into a four-dimensional Earth model.

Short CV:  Dietmar Müller received his undergraduate degree from the Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel in Germany, followed by a PhD in Earth Science from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego/California in 1993. After joining the University of Sydney as a Lecturer in Geophysics in 1993, he established the University of Sydney Institute of Marine Science and built the EarthByte e-research group.

Planned activities at LMU include a short course for using GPlates www.gplates.org software for interactive plate reconstructions. In GPlates global and regional tectonic data sets can be compiled, evaluated to derive and test alternative plate kinematic models.  In turn these models can be linked to geodynamic modelling software such as Terra and CitcomS for alternative geodynamic hypothesis testing.