Ivan Savov joined DTM as a Carnegie Fellow in September. A geochemist, Savov obtained his Ph.D. at the University of South Florida last year under the supervision of a former DTM Fellow, Jeffrey Ryan. Over the past year, Savov held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution , where he studied recent volcanic deposits in Armenia. His Ph.D. thesis was a petrological and geochemical study of the Mariana island arc system. One of the best tracers for tracking the interaction of subsurface rocks and magmas with fluids released from subducting lithosphere is boron isotope systematics. A former DTM Fellow, Petrus LeRoux, developed a new procedure for precise determination of B isotope ratios by means of in situ laser ablation used in concert with a multiple-collector, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer (ICP-MS). Savov plans to apply this procedure to several suites of basalts from oceanic islands, with the aim of improving the characterization of major geochemical reservoirs in the oceanic mantle.