Sarah Incel
EMRP Earth Magnetism & Rock Physics
The 2024 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Sarah Incel for her outstanding research in the field of mineral and rock physics, and her novel understanding of the interplay between mineral phase transformations and the generation of deep earthquakes.
Sarah Incel is receiving the award for her outstanding research in the field of experimental mineral and rock physics and her novel understanding of the interplay between mineral phase transformations and the generation of intermediate-depth earthquakes; a long-standing open question in geology due to the remoteness of phenomena occurring at up to a few hundreds of kilometers depth in the Earth, and the chemical complexity and tremendous heterogeneity of Earth’s upper mantle.
ncel managed impressively to overcome all the challenges of performing experimental work under extreme conditions and pioneering new experimental and analytical techniques, mastering and combining knowledge in petrology, thermodynamics, geophysics, seismology and rock mechanics.
Her results, truly ground-breaking, were published in several articles within Nature Geosciences, Nature Communications, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Geology, Journal of Geophysical Research and Geophysics, Geochemistry and Geosystems, among others. Incel’s work, is, without a doubt, an important new landmark for the mineral and rock physics community. Her work, at the intersection between three distinct scientific communities: tectono-physics; seismology and mineralogy; and rock physics, has already made such a sustained imprint in Earth sciences at this early stage of her career. She has presented her results, and has given outstanding talks, at a number of international workshops and conferences and she has been the recipient of prestigious prizes and fellowships: the Beate-Mocek Preis 2016 of the Deutsche Mineralogische Gesellschaft, a Feodor Lynen post-doctoral fellowship, from the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation, the Victor-Moritz- Goldschmidt-Preis 2022 of the Deutsche Mineralogische Gesellschaft, and a National Environmental Research Council fellowship in the UK.