Background

Dr. Eggert's thesis research focused on pressure-induced insulator-metal transitions in xenon and hydrogen. In 1991 he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, implementing an optical laboratory for diamond-anvil cell (DAC) studies. In 1992 he began a postdoctoral fellowship at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, DC, concentrating on studies of the solid hydrogens at very high pressure. Dr. Eggert was an assistant professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, for two years beginning in 1994. He moved to the Colorado School of Mines, Golden, Colardo, in 1996. As a professor, Dr. Eggert continued to work on high pressure physics as well as broadening into the study of granular materials. In 1999, he took a two-year leave of absence to work at the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique near Paris, France. While there, Dr. Eggert developed a highly-accurate method for measuring x-ray diffraction of liquids in the DAC. In 2001, Dr. Eggert joined the Laser Shock Equation of State group at LLNL.  He was group leader of the Dynamic Materials Properties group from 2015 to 2020, and has been the Chief HED Scientist for JHEDS since 2020.

At LLNL, Dr. Eggert has worked on and developed a wide variety of laser-driven dynamic-compression diagnostics:  dynamic x-ray diffraction at Omega and NIF; Hugoniot stress-density measurements at Omega and NIF; ramp-compression absolute stress-density measurements on NIF; coupling laser-generated shock waves into DACs to study compressible fluids at Omega and NIF; melting of transparent solids at Omega; time-resolved x-ray diffraction on NIF; deviatoric strain measurements using diffraction at Omega; diffraction and other x-ray-based measurements using synchrotron and XFEL sources. 

Dr. Eggert is an author on over 200 publications and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Ph.D., Physics, Harvard University, 1991

M.A., Physics, Harvard University, 1987

B.S., Physics, Montana State University, 1985