Kai Deng is an Associate Professor at the State Key Laboratory of Marine Geology, Tongji University, located in Shanghai, China. As a marine geologist and geochemist, his primary research focuses on continental erosion and weathering, the oceanic cycling of trace metals, and the environmental factors that control these processes. His research employs a variety of geochemical methods, including the use of cosmogenic beryllium-10, strontium-neodymium isotopes, elemental ratios, and numerical modeling. To date, he has authored more than twenty peer-reviewed publications.
Kai completed his B.Sc. in Geology and his Ph.D. in Marine Science at Tongji University. His doctoral thesis focused on the application of the 10Be (meteoric)/9Be proxy in a tectonically active mountain belt to quantify sediment production and transport processes. This thesis was supervised by Prof. Shouye Yang (Tongji University), Prof. Friedhelm von Blanckenburg (GFZ Potsdam and Free University of Berlin), and Dr. Hella Wittmann (GFZ Potsdam). Kai was later awarded the esteemed ETH Zurich Postdoctoral Fellowship, where he worked with Prof. Derek Vance. His research project at ETH Zurich aimed to delineate the role of continental margin sediments in the oceanic cycling of beryllium. Prior to his professorship at Tongji University, Kai was awarded the Humboldt Research Fellowship in Germany, where he investigated continental weathering processes using metal stable isotopes. He was recognized with the Outstanding Student Paper Award at the sixteenth annual meeting of the Chinese Society for Mineralogy, Petrology, and Geochemistry in 2017. He has served as a reviewer for approximately twenty scientific journals and was named the Outstanding Reviewer for Science of the Total Environment in 2017. Additionally, he co-convened GEOTRACES-related sessions at the Goldschmidt conference in 2022 and 2023.