Who’s Who? Who’s New?

This April, EAPS welcomes two new members to the department, postdoctoral associates Xiaozhou Ruan and Justin Jacquot.

Postdoctoral associate Xiaozhou Ruan is a physical oceanographer. He has worked on different projects involving (1) in-situ observations using autonomous robots in the polar ocean; (2) theoretical and modeling aspects of physical oceanography with a primary focus on boundary layer dynamics and near-wall turbulence. He is currently working in the Ferrari group investigating how the small-scale turbulence in the oceanic bottom boundary layers affects the large-scale abyssal overturning circulation and climate. This work will provide insights on how the abyssal ocean stores and redistributes carbon, heat and nutrients over centennial and millennial timescales. He uses a combination of theoretical fluid dynamics, numerical modeling and analysis of observations to tackle these problems.

Xiaozhou received his PhD in Environmental Science and Engineering with a minor degree in Applied and Computational Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 2019.   

Joining the Cziczo group, postdoctoral associate Justin Jacquot works in the field of experimental optics, particularly the characterization of atmospheric particles. Some of his early research included building an icing chamber to create and investigate mixed-phase cloud conditions in the lab. He used this to improve the Interferometric Particle Imaging (IPI) technique with a focus on water droplets and ice crystals sizing and discrimination. This project helped develop a new airborne instrument for detecting icing conditions for commercial aircraft (http://www.haic.eu/).  

Since then, Jacquot has mainly worked on an optical technique called Digital In-line Holography (DIH) to observe micron-sized liquid/ice particles in lab. Recently, his research investigated the imaging of rough surfaces at the microscopic scale with backscatter digital-holography. Before arriving at MIT, Jacquot worked with the Ariya group at McGill University and the Berg group at Kansas State University. 
In EAPS, Jacquot will help develop the Next Generation of Particle Analysis by Laser Mass Spectrometry (PALMS NG). This instrument will be deployed during the DCOTSS flights on the NASA ER2 aircraft in 2020 (https://dcotss.org/).

Justin Jacquot received his PhD (2016) from the Normandie Université, and his MSc (2012) and BSc (2010) from the Université de Lorraine.