Understand how individual components influence each other

Prof. Dr Johannes Buchen comes to Bayreuth from Oxford. He worked at the University of Oxford as a research associate in "Mineral Physics" and before that at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as a research associate, also at the interface between mineralogy and geophysics. He completed his doctorate at the Bavarian Geoinstitute at the University of Bayreuth in the field of experimental geosciences.

"The decisive factor for me to accept the call to Bayreuth University is certainly the special position of the Bavarian Geoinstitute as a globally renowned institution for high-pressure geoscientific research," says Prof. Dr. Johannes Buchen. The unique infrastructure of the Geoinstitute allows him to pursue precisely the research questions he would like to focus his research on in the coming years. "In my research, I deal with the properties of rocks and minerals of the deep Earth. To simulate the conditions that prevail deep inside the Earth, I use high-pressure experiments," says Buchen. With these experiments, he researches how materials behave at depths of hundreds to thousands of metres - in other words, much deeper than a borehole could penetrate into the earth, for example. "We then compare the results of such experiments with geophysical observations to find out what rocks or materials make up the Earth at depth. This information helps us understand why the Earth evolved in such a way that continents and oceans were able to form on its surface, and ultimately why the conditions for the development of life were created."

In terms of teaching, Prof. Dr Johannes Buchen will be involved in the Experimental Geosciences Master's programme. "I also hope to be able to attract students from other departments to one or two lectures. Many experimental methods and theoretical approaches that we use in mineralogy and geophysics may well be exciting for students of materials science, chemistry, physics or earth and environmental sciences," says Buchen. "Above all, I would be pleased if I succeeded in giving the students not only the precision and accuracy that are indispensable in science, but also a view of planet Earth as a whole. The climate catastrophe shows very clearly how everything is interconnected in the Earth system and that it is important for us humans to understand how the individual components, such as the atmosphere, the oceans and the solid Earth, interact and influence each other."