Weiran Li (Alex)
​李蔚然

Welcome to my website! 

I am a petrologist-geochemist-volcanologist from Sichuan China, currently working as a postdoc at University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. My research combines petrological observations, chemical analyses, thermodynamic and diffusion modelling (Python/Matlab), as well as high-T experiments to unravel:

(1) the cause of different volcanic eruption styles and the architecture of volcano plumbing systems

(3) the behaviour of volatiles in subduction-zone magmatism

(4) the timescale of magma mixing and ascent

(5) the behaviour of rare earth elements in minerals and melts 

(6) mantle temperature-lithology and their influences on mantle upwelling (current project).

My research areas include Merapi volcano (Indonesia), Mount Erebus (Antarctica), Changbaishan volcano (China), and Mayon volcano (Philippines). 

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After undergraduate and master studies on geochemistry and geochronology at Peking University (China), I moved to NTU (Singapore) in 2014 for a Ph.D. on investigating effusive-explosive transition of volcanic eruptions using mineral apatite (see research projects and models/tools). During my Ph.D., I visited Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany) for three months and performed diffusion experiments there (thanks to the Stephen Riady Geosciences Scholarship).

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Apart from working on petrology and thermodynamics, I have experience in geochronology studies such as 40Ar/39Ar dating of young volcanic rocks (topic of master thesis) and U-Th dating of speleothem from Sulawesi, Indonesia (side project of Ph.D.). 

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Please feel free to email me (wl413@cam.ac.uk) if you would like to collaborate or have any questions on the models we developed.