Presentation of the Mineralogical Society of America Award for 2016 to Anat Shaha

Abstract

I am privileged and honored to introduce the 2016 MSA award recipient, Dr. Anat Shahar. This award recognizes outstanding published contributions to the science of mineralogy by relatively young individual or individuals near the beginning of their professional careers. In Anat’s case, she is being recognized at an early age for helping to establish a new field. The field I shall refer to as planetary stable isotope geochemistry. At its essence, stable isotope geochemistry of high-temperature materials is about crystal chemistry of the materials of interest, and so it is appropriate that the advances in this area should be recognized by the MSA. Anat’s first foray into this new field came in the beginning of her graduate career in which she found herself recruited to join our effort to characterize the iron isotope effects of an applied voltage. This first work on iron isotopes and unconventional driving forces for isotope fractionation kindled something in Anat’s thinking. Anat has since focused her research on the use of high-pressure/high-temperature experiments to explore the fractionation of stable isotopes between phases relevant to the differentiation of rocky planets and high-temperature …