Department of Earth Sciences welcomes new Schmidt AI in Science Fellow Dr Auggie Marignier

The Department of Earth Sciences is delighted to welcome Dr Auggie Marignier as our first Schmidt AI in Science Fellow.

Now entering its third year, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme is helping to accelerate scientific progress through the application of Artificial Intelligence to STEM research. The prestigious programme is part of a new international initiative to drive innovative use of AI techniques in research across the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematical sciences.

Auggie’s research interests primarily revolve around geophysical inversion methods – the data science, machine learning and statistics that tell us what lies deep beneath our feet. As an AI in Science Fellow, he will use novel AI techniques for seismic imaging to tackle a long-standing issue in global seismology – the structure of the inner core – as part of his project entitled “Illuminating the Earth’s inner core with Bayesian AI”.

Auggie obtained his PhD in Data Intensive Science at University College London, studying probabilistic inversion techniques to reconstruct seismic images of the Earth’s upper mantle and, looking beyond Earth, maps of dark matter around distant galaxy clusters.  These methods, while computationally expensive, provide uncertainty information that is commonly lacking in other methods but is crucial for the scientific interpretation of the images. 

Following his PhD, he spent two years as a postdoc at the Australian National University developing new methods to seismically measure the thickness of sediments at continental scales, and improving the resolution of mineral deposits for geophysical exploration.  Most recently he has been working with the Earth Rover Program, which is pioneering the use of seismology and geophysics to study the health of soils in agricultural settings.

Alongside Auggie, nine other outstanding early-career researchers will join MPLS as part of the 2025 fellowship cohort, using AI to advance fields ranging from cosmology to conservation, and from solar cell design to storm surge prediction. Through a combination of research, training, and collaboration, the Schmidt AI in Science Fellows are developing cutting-edge AI tools and applying them to pressing scientific challenges.