Sharmaine Verhaert

Sharmaine Verhaert is a PhD student at the University of Adelaide's Department of Earth Sciences, Australia. She received both her BSc and MSc in Geology from Ghent University, Belgium, and studied at ETH Zürich, Switzerland, under the Swiss European Mobility Programme (SEMP). Sharmaine’s PhD research focuses on the use of detrital minerals (mainly the metamorphic mineral garnet) for geochronological purposes. By dating these detrital minerals with the radiometric Lu-Hf dating method, which is based on the natural radioactive decay of lutetium to hafnium, she tries to reconstruct the tectonic histories of orogenic systems and past (super)continent configurations. Sharmaine is currently applying this dating technique to samples from South Australia, East Antarctica and the Himalayas.