About Ben Elliott

Ben Elliott is an Associate Project Scientist in the Tripati lab, in the Department of Earth Planetary and Space Sciences at UCLA. He completed His Bachelor’s Degree at Utah State University in 2003 with a major in Professional Chemistry and a minor in Latin. He stayed to complete a Master’s degree in Theoretical Chemistry, submitting his thesis in 2005. He then went on to complete a PhD in experimental Physical Chemistry/Chemical Physics at Yale University in 2010. His PhD focused on scientific instrumentation, specializing in mass spectrometry and laser spectroscopy.

Following the completion of his PhD, Ben worked as a Staff Research Assistant at UCLA in Ultrafast Laser Spectroscopy of solvated charge dynamics, from 2010 to 2012. Ben then was granted a NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship, in 2013, to work on high accuracy spectroscopy of Carbon Dioxide at NASA, Jet Propulsion Lab.

In 2015, Ben returned to UCLA to work in the Tripati Lab as Lab Manager and Technician, where he has worked ever since. As Lab Manager, Ben spends his time in the lab making sure that the instrumentation works and training lab members in their use.

Ben is dedicated to mentoring and training early-career scientists and students in laboratory techniques and experimentation. While the instrumentation and lab are his primary concern, he gets the most fulfillment from training and aiding students in completing their goals as scholars in environmental and climate research.