Rate My Professor Maximilian Droellner

Dr. Maximilian Droellner is an Adjunct Research Fellow in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences within the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Curtin University, a role he assumed in 2025. He simultaneously serves as a Lecturer at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Droellner obtained his PhD from Curtin University in 2023, an MSc in Geosciences from the University of Münster in 2019, and a BSc in Geosciences from the University of Münster in 2017. His professional journey at Curtin encompasses a PhD studentship from 2020 to 2023, Research Associate positions from 2023 to 2024 and earlier from 2021 to 2022, Technical Assistant at the John de Laeter Centre from 2021 to 2022, and Sessional Academic roles starting in 2020. In recognition of his outstanding doctoral work, he received the Krishna & Pamela Sappal Prize from the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences for the best thesis in 2023.

Droellner's academic interests lie in sedimentary provenance analysis, integrating chemical and mineralogical approaches such as (U-Th)/He thermochronology, U-Pb geochronology on detrital minerals like zircon and rutile, isotope geochemistry, and automated mineralogy for large-scale studies. Affiliated with Curtin's Timescales of Mineral Systems Group, he develops and applies single-grain provenance tools to unlock the detrital record, addressing questions on sediment routing, heavy mineral sand deposit formation, early Earth processes, and recent climatic changes. His influential publications include 'Every zircon deserves a date: selection bias in detrital geochronology' (Geological Magazine, 2021), 'Gaining from loss: Detrital zircon source-normalized α-dose discriminates first-versus multi-cycle grain histories' (Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 2022), 'A persistent Hadean–Eoarchean protocrust in the western Yilgarn Craton, Western Australia' (Terra Nova, 2022), 'Reorganization of continent-scale sediment routing based on detrital zircon and rutile multi-proxy analysis' (Basin Research, 2023), 'Directly Dating Plio-Pleistocene Climate Change in the Terrestrial Record' (Geophysical Research Letters, 2023), 'The Cenozoic evolution of the Yellow River' (Earth-Science Reviews, 2025), and 'Tracking thermal histories through the detrital record using rutile U-Pb-He double-dating' (Geology, 2025). These works, amassing over 219 citations, have illuminated ancient crustal survival through mountain-building events, continent-scale heavy mineral patterns linked to climate and erosion, and cryptic recycling in detrital minerals, significantly impacting geochronology and provenance studies.