Henry Towbin
  • About
  • Publications
  • Posts

I’m a scientist in Brooklyn, NY. I use Python to analyze scientific data, combining my own measurements (spectroscopy, micro-CT, electron microprobe and SIMS) with published datasets and physical models to answer research questions.

Most recently I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Gemological Institute of America (2023 to 2025), where I built data pipelines for FTIR and Raman spectra of diamonds. Before that I did my PhD at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory on how mantle rocks change on their way to the surface, and before graduate school I ran micro-CT and electron microscopy at the American Museum of Natural History.

I’m looking for data science roles in New York City and am also open to imaging and geoscience work. The posts below cover my research and code; my software is on GitHub.


Mercury 2.5: a cheap diffusion LLM with a hard ceiling

What Mercury 2.5, a fast and cheap diffusion language model, did inside a coding agent I built around it: where it held up, where it failed, and what it cost.

October 2026

Mantle rocks start melting on their way to the surface

A plain-language summary of Towbin and Plank (2026), Decompression Melting of Peridotite Xenoliths, Journal of Petrology

October 2026

Studying the Winston Red diamond at the Smithsonian

Notes on Farfan et al. (2025), A Study of the Winston Red: The Smithsonian’s New Fancy Red Diamond, Gems & Gemology

April 2025

PyIRoGlass: fitting infrared baselines with PCA and Bayesian sampling

A summary of Shi, Towbin et al. (2024), PyIRoGlass: An open-source, Bayesian MCMC algorithm for fitting baselines to FTIR spectra of basaltic-andesitic glasses, Volcanica

July 2024

Making reference glasses for measuring volcanic gases

A summary of Moussallam, Towbin, Plank et al. (2024), ND70 series basaltic glass reference materials for volatile element measurement, Geostandards and Geoanalytical Research

July 2024

Why measurements of water in olivine disagreed, and how to calibrate them

A summary of Towbin, Plank, Klein and Hauri (2023), Measuring H2O Concentrations in Olivine by Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry, American Mineralogist

May 2023

Lamont-Doherty Research As Art

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s Annual Research as Art exhibition showcases the many creative talents of our community and links, either deliberate or incidental, between…
April 2018

Brain Anatomy MRI

I have animated my brain anatomy from MRI data. There are a few parts I was unable to segment so for anyone with knowledge of brain anatomy please don’t diagnose me for any…
November 2017

Olivine Phenocryst

These images were produced using X-ray computed tomography to demonstrate the three dimensional structure and inclusions of volcanic crystals the size of sand grains.…
November 2017
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