Super proud of Dr. Mingda Lv, who returned to visit us at MSU this week! He was our alumnus colloquium speaker as part of festivities for MSU Homecoming week. He gave a great talk on his path “Bridging academia to industry,” from what he learned as a student (~1/3 of that time during the pandemic) through Zoom defense and graduation in spring 2021, to postdoc at Argonne National Lab, recently to his new job in X-ray instrumentation at Rigaku back in Michigan. His concluding remarks citing Wapman et al. 2022, Chen et al.’s preprint, educating the department about visas for international students, and recommending steps to support students were important and impactful.

On September 19th, Suki gave an online talk at the monthly APS High Pressure Interest Group meeting on “The deep Earth redox engine.” Here’s the recording!

Other past talks can be found here: https://hpcat.aps.anl.gov/meetings/high-pressure-meeting

Luisa Fernanda Chavarría Chavarría has joined our lab as a new Ph.D. student! Luisa earned her B.S. and M.S. from EAFIT University in Colombia and has recently been working for the Colombian Geological Survey. Welcome!

Next week is the online Annual Meeting of the Consortium for Materials Properties Research in Earth Sciences. Suki will present “Pressure enhances sodium solubility in magnesiowüstite.” BK will be speaking about “Effects of redox conditions on the stability of carbonate in Earth’s lower mantle.” Allison‘s talk will be “Broadening of Fe-Nitride Spin Transitions Under Nonhydrostatic Compression and Impacts on the Strength of Fe-Nitrides”. Here’s the program: https://compres.unm.edu/sites/default/files/meetings/documents/DetailedProgram2022.pdf

Naomi Singleton is working with us this summer as part of the GeoCaFES program. She is a third year undergraduate student at Northeastern Illinois University. Welcome Naomi!

Thanks again to Grace Brekke for her work over the past year and congratulations on graduating! Grace will be starting student teaching in the fall and is interested in Education Technology.

Congratulations to Allison Pease, the 2022 recipient of the MSA Kraus Research Grant in Crystallography for her project “Structural Variation in Silicate Perovskites”! This award is given to one early-career researcher per year to support costs of research in mineralogical crystallography.

http://www.minsocam.org/msa/awards/crystallography_award.html

Mingda Lv was awarded the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences Excellence in Ph.D. Research award for his dissertation, “Carbon and Nitrogen in Planetary Interiors.” Well deserved!

Congratulations also to Allison Pease who received a Lucile and Gordon Pringle Fellowship for her excellent academic work!

https://ees.natsci.msu.edu/awards/2022-awards-grads/2022-ees-award-winners-list/

Extra congratulations to Allison, who passed her comprehensive exams after the awards ceremony and advanced to Ph.D. candidacy!

Congratulations to Allison Pease and fellow EES student winners of the Michigan Space Grant Consortium graduate fellowships!

https://ees.natsci.msu.edu/news/ees-graduate-students-awarded-2022-msgc-fellowships/

Congratulations to Dr. Ben Brugman on the publication of his first-first-author paper, “Strength, deformation, and equation of state of tungsten carbide to 66 GPa” in Acta Materialia!

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359645421006819?dgcid=coauthor

https://eos.org/agu-news/2021-agu-section-awardees-and-named-lecturers

https://ees.natsci.msu.edu/news/recent-ees-grad-receives-two-agu-student-awards/

Congratulations to Dr. Mingda Lv (Ph.D. 2021) who is BOTH the John Jamieson Student Paper awardee in Mineral and Rock Physics and the Graduate Student Research awardee in Study of Earth’s Deep Interior!!! We are so so proud!

My talk from the workshop “Advances in Synchrotron-Based Research Towards Understanding the Structure, Evolution, and Dynamics of Earth and Planetary Interiors” is available on YouTube: