Ming Hao received the 2022 Mineral and Rock Physics Graduate Research Award for his outstanding work investigating the seismic visibility of eclogite in Earth’s upper mantle based on the experimentally determined pressure-/temperature-dependent single-crystal elasticity of omphacite and jadeite. Ming’s work on the high-pressure/-temperature elasticity of omphacite provides the most important thermal elastic parameters that are in critical need for locating eclogite in Earth’s upper mantle through seismic observations. The subducted basalt, or eclogite, is among the most important compositional heterogeneities in Earth’s deep interior. He found that an undeformed eclogite transformed from mid-ocean ridge basalt is seismically invisible between 200- and 300-kilometer depth, and a deformed 10-kilometer-thick oceanic crust can result in a delay time of approximately 0.2 second, which is not ignorable in the seismic shear-wave-splitting observations. Moreover, Ming also conducted the first high-pressure/-temperature single-crystal elasticity measurements on jadeite. He found that the shear modulus, thus Vs of jadeite, has extremely small, if not negligible, temperature dependence. Jadeite is extremely fast, even faster than pyrope, which is the magnesium (Mg) end-member of garnet, under upper mantle pressure-temperature conditions. As a result, the continentally originated sediments/crust, if subducted or delaminated into the deep Earth, would be significantly faster than the ambient mantle due to the abundance of jadeite in them. These discoveries are important for not only the mineral physics field but also the broader geophysics and geochemistry community, in terms of studying various geochemical heterogeneities in Earth’s interior. Since the completion of his Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico, Ming has become a postdoctoral fellow at the Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science. He is now using a multianvil press to conduct sound velocity and electric resistivity measurements simultaneously on mantle materials at high-pressure/temperature conditions. —Jin Zhang, Texas A&M University, College Station

I am honored and humbled to receive the 2022 Mineral and Rock Physics (MRP) Graduate Research Award. I am lucky that I had the chance to work with excellent people during my Ph.D. study at the University of New Mexico. I would first give my thanks to Dr. Jin Zhang, my adviser, for all the guidance and encouragement in the past 5 years. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Jin for her patient instruction and help to clarify various confusions that I encountered during my Ph.D. I also would like to thank all the wonderful scientists who have helped me in the past few years. Dr. Brandon Schmandt is my go-to person for seismology. Dr. Przemek Dera, Dr. Dongzhou Zhang, and Dr. Rostislav Hrubiak have provided enormous amounts of help with the X-ray diffraction experiments and X-ray falling sphere viscometry experiments (in particular, during the pandemic!). I am also thankful for all the stimulating discussions with Dr. Bin Chen, Dr. Adrian Brearley, Dr. Joshua Townsend, Dr. Peter Olson, and Dr. Qin Wang. I am also fortunate to conduct my Ph.D. research and collaborate with so many capable, kind, and helpful student/postdoc scientists such as Wen-Yi Zhou and Dr. Mingqiang Hou in Jin’s research group. Finally, thanks to the AGU Mineral and Rock Physics section for this award, and it means a lot to me. Thank you for your efforts to support graduate research. —Ming Hao, Earth and Planets Laboratory, Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, D.C.