Profile

Allan Lerner was born and raised in Queens, New York. He obtained his BA in geology from Amherst College, MA, studying a pumice fall in the Aleutian Islands as his senior thesis. He spent time as a research assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory, followed by interning at the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, and at the University of Colima, Mexico. Allan came to the University of Oregon after completing his Masters Degree at Oregon State University, where he investigated the petrologic utility of zircon-hosted melt inclusions from the ridiculously large Youngest Toba Tuff (Sumatra, Indonesia) eruption.

Allan has been part of the Volcanology, Geochemistry, and Petrology (VGP) group at UO, working with Dr. Paul Wallace and colleagues at USGS Volcano Observatories to pursue his fondness for petrology and volcanic gases. He completed his PhD in 2020, with a dissertation entitled: The Depths and Locations of Magma Reservoirs and their Consequences for the Behavior of Sulfur and Volcanic Degassing.

Allan continues to conduct research in the UO Department of Earth Sciences and helps to manage the Wallace petrology lab.