Andrew M. Davis

Andrew M. Davis (born 1950) is an American

geoscience at the University of Chicago.^[1]^[2] He is the son of American chemist and physicist Raymond Davis Jr., a Nobel Prize in Physics laureate

. His main field of study is the origin of the elements by stellar nucleosynthesis. He currently is the head of a project to build a new instrument called the ion nanoprobe, which will allow isotopic and chemical analysis at finer scales than any contemporary instrument. He is also studying the cometary dust and contemporary interstellar dust returned to Earth by the Stardust spacecraft in 2006. In 2018, he was made Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.^[3]

Academic Research

He is conducting research about the isotopic compositions of refractory inclusions in

solar nebula

and on the asteroidal parent bodies of meteorites.

Tiny (<10 μm in diameter) grains of

supernovae) survived potentially destructive processes in the interstellar medium and during solar system formation, and can now be found in meteorites. These grains preserve an isotopic record of the nucleosynthesis in individual stars. He is measuring the isotopic compositions of these grains with a new technique, resonant ionization mass spectrometry, that was developed by his collaborators at Argonne National Laboratory

.