Most of the Earth’s geological and geophysical activity occurs because our planet is cooling to space, thereby inducing currents of cold sinking and hot rising material, otherwise known as convection. Convection in the Earth’s mantle is the engine of plate tectonics and gives rise to the creation of ocean basins and continents; similarly, convection in the Earth’s liquid-iron outer-core powers the geomagnetic field. Understanding how the Earth has been evolving in this way is one of the many aspects of studying the physics of the Earth’s interior. Geophysical research is fundamentally multidisciplinary, and here at Yale we employ a variety of observational, experimental, and theoretical approaches to investigate the structure and dynamics of the Earth from atomic to global scale.