Demouchy receives EMU Research Excellence Medal
October 2017 Issue Table of Contents
Demouchy Receives EMU Research Excellence Medal
Sylvie DeMouchy
The 2016 EMU Research Excellence Medal has been awarded to Sylvie Demouchy of CNRS, Geosciences Montpellier (France) for her scientific leadership in experimental geochemistry and mineral physics, her scientific breadth, and her extensive service to the academic community. She completed her PhD at the Bayerisches Geoinstitut (Germany), focusing on hydrogen incorporation mechanisms in olivine and its high-pressure polymorph wadsleyite. She subsequently went on to post-doctoral positions at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston, and the University of Minnesota (USA), where she has broadened her scientific portfolio by becoming a rock squeezer. In 2007, she moved to the CNRS in Montpellier, where she is currently a tenure researcher in the Mantle-Interfaces research group, leading their high-pressure laboratory and enjoying experimental mineralogy with the young researchers. She is coauthor of over 36 major publications in top international journals, making significant breakthroughs in the understanding of hydrogen mobility in upper mantle minerals, and the viscoplasticity of olivine-rich rocks, using both experimental techniques and natural mantle rock specimens. She has consistently demonstrated that rheological laws established at high-temperature cannot be extrapolated to lithospheric conditions, and has elegantly demonstrated that hydrolytic weakening of olivine is probably only a minor effect in the uppermost mantle. In addition to her research achievements, Sylvie has been involved in several European research programs during her career, as a student on the European Union’s Training and Mobility of Researcher’s HydroSpec programme (TMR HydroSpec), a young researcher on the EU’s Marie Curie project International Reintegration Grand’s Physics of the Earth’s Mantle (IRG PoEM), to a PhD supervisor for the European Union’s Horizon 2020 action Innovative Training Network for Complex Rheologies in Earth dynamics and industrial Processes (ITN CREEP), and trained a large number of research students and young scientists.
Dr. Demouchy presented her award talk at the Goldschmidt conference in Paris (France) in August 2017 during session 7e, “Diffusion, deformation and transport processes in geomaterials”. Her presentation focused on the distribution of hydrogen in the rocks of the uppermost mantle and its consequences on Earth’s dynamic.