Nadège Hilairet - 2019 Research Excellence Award of the EMU

Nadège Hilairet, former student at the ENS de Lyon and PhD at the Geology Laboratory of Lyon - Earth, Planets, Environment, now working at Université de Lille, received the 2019 Research Excellence Award of the European Mineralogical Union (EMU). The recipient of the 2019 Research Excellence Award of the European Mineralogical Union is Dr. Nadège Hilairet from Université de Lille, France. She received the award for her outstanding contributions to understanding rock deformation and rheology as well as for her international collaborative research. Dr. Hilairet's achievements in the field of physics and mechanics of the deformation of crystals and poly-crystalline aggregates are remarkable in terms of originality and depth. Through her experimental approach, she has created new data and insights that have allowed an unprecedented view and understanding of the rheological properties of rocks and the mechanism of earthquake formation. In particular, she has contributed to important advances in our understanding of how phase changes impact the mechanical stability of deforming materials and how we can measure these effects using cutting edge tools such as synchrotron x-ray diffraction and acoustic emissions. The use of  synchrotron diffraction to probe deformation experiments in the D-DIA apparatus is a relatively new field and Dr. Hilairet has been one of its pioneers.