It is my great pleasure to recognize Dr. Wen-Yi Zhou as a recipient of the 2023 Mineral and Rock Physics Graduate Research Award. During her Ph.D., Wen-Yi has been primarily studying potentially the Earth’s largest deepwater reservoir–mantle transition zone (MTZ) from a mineral physics perspective over the past few years. She established the first experimentally determined composition (water and Fe), pressure, and temperature-dependent elasticity model of wadsleyite, and applied it toward quantitatively mapping the mineralogical, thermal, and water content heterogeneities in the MTZ. This is a significant step toward establishing a multidimensional petrological model of Earth’s interior. In addition to that, she has conducted high-pressure, high-temperature phase equilibrium experiments on Martian basalts. Owing to the Al-poor nature of Martian basalts, the significantly smaller amount of garnet in the Martian eclogite transformed from basalt makes it less dense than the terrestrial eclogite with mid-ocean ridge basalt (MORB) composition. This discovery provided a potential explanation for the lack of self-sustained slab subduction on Mars. Since the completion of her Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico, Wen-Yi is now a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University and is continuing her research endeavors in the field of mineral physics. —Jin Zhang, Department of Geology and Physics, Texas A&M University, College Station

It’s my great honor to receive the 2023 Mineral and Rock Physics Graduate Research Award from AGU. I want to thank my Ph.D. adviser, Dr. Jin Zhang, for her enormous guidance and support in my research and career development. I would like to thank Brandon Schmandt and Bin Chen for their generosity in sharing ideas and their time throughout my career. Special thanks to Przemyslaw Dera and Dongzhou Zhang for their generous help in numerous experiments, which are important to my research. I also want to express my gratitude to Peter Olson, Charles Shear, and Carl Agee for their patient guidance in the Martian basalts project. I am also fortunate to have groupmates like Ming Hao, Zhiyuan Ren, Wade Mans, and Rose Hurlow, who are both kind and supportive. Many thanks to the AGU Mineral and Rock Physics section for this recognition—it means a lot to me. —Wen-Yi Zhou, Texas A&M University, College Station

Wen-Yi Zhou received the 2022 Mineral and Rock Physics (MRP) John C. Jamieson Student Paper Award for her outstanding work investigating water content, temperature, and olivine fraction variations at 410-kilometer depth using high-pressure/-temperature elasticity data of wadsleyite. This work was published in Nature Communications earlier this year and presents the first simultaneously inverted 2D temperature and petrological model in Earth’s interior based on experimentally determined mineral physics data. This study also provides direct evidence for the thermochemical heterogeneities in Earth’s interior, which is important for understanding the material exchange processes between the upper and lower mantle. Wen-Yi is expected to graduate with a Ph.D. degree from the University of New Mexico in winter 2022. —Jin Zhang, Texas A&M University, College Station

I am honored and humbled to receive the 2022 John C. Jamieson Student Paper Award from the Mineral and Rock Physics section of AGU. I am fortunate to have the opportunity to work on this project and am grateful for the generous help from all my wonderful coauthors. I would first like to thank my Ph.D. adviser and coauthor, Jin Zhang (Texas A&M University), for her guidance and support from the day we began experiments to the day the paper got accepted. Her timely feedbacks and years of experience helped me overcome difficulties and achieve progress in every step. She encouraged me to read literature in different fields to be open-minded and always supported me to gain new skills. She is also a role model who gives me the courage to pursue science. I would also like to thank all the other authors who have offered a lot of help for this research project. Ming Hao (Carnegie Institution for Science) generously helped me with these 24-hour experiments. Brandon Schmandt (University of New Mexico) introduced me to the world of seismology and inspired me to study mantle heterogeneities from a global perspective. Bin Chen (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) helped us to synthesize precious wadsleyite samples and provided insightful suggestions about the manuscript. Ruijia Wang (Southern University of Science and Technology) offered her professional help in coding whenever I needed it. Many thanks to the Mineral and Rock Physics section of AGU for this award. —Wen-Yi Zhou, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque