Career
Szilas has been on about a dozen climbing expeditions around the world, which have resulted in several first ascents of previously unclimbed mountains. A few of these expeditions were carried out together with the American mountaineer Jess Roskelley according to Szilas" personal website. Szilas was trained as a geologist from the University of Copenhagen where he obtained a Doctor of Philosophy in 2012.
He does research on some of the oldest rocks on Earth, found in Southwest Greenland.
Szilas has previously carried out postdoctoral research at Columbia University in New York and currently works as a researcher at Stanford University in California. According to his personal statement his research: "focuses on the geochemistry and petrology of Archaean rocks from Greenland.
lieutenant aims at understanding the relations between ultramafic and mafic-andesitic rock assemblages in order to place constraints on models for the evolution of the craton.".