Alexandra Navrotsky

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 Ole J. Kleppa.

In 1967, she went to Germany at the Clausthal University of Technology for postdoctoral work with Hermann Schmalzried. 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, 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. From 2013 to 2017, she was interim dean of Mathematical and Physical Sciences in the College of Letters and Sciences, at University of California, Davis. She is currently a Regents Professor at Arizona State University and has directed the Navrotsky-Eyring Center for Materials of the Universe since 2019. The center’s main goals are to better understand planet formation, composition, and evolution. 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. Navrotsky has produced significant research through her laboratory the Peter A. Rock Thermochemistry Laboratory. Here she has developed unique high temperature calorimetric techniques and instruments.