Eloise Gaïllou joined DTM this week as a visiting investigator, an appointment that will run until the end of this year. She will then continue on as a Carnegie Fellow in the geochemistry group. Gaillou received her Ph.D. in material physics from Institut des Matériaux Jean Rouxel in Nantes, France, in 2006, and is an expert on gem minerals, particularly the structure of opal and color in diamonds. Since graduating, she has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.

At DTM, Gaillou will work with Steve Shirey on sulfide inclusions from two suites of diamonds. The first suite consists of subduction-related diamonds from Dachine, Guyana, and will be used to address the question of whether diamonds can form directly in subduction settings from recycled crustal material. Because these diamonds are komatiite-hosted, they did not form in the lithosphere and they therefore provide an opportunity to determine the volatile content of the komatiite source and see how diamonds form in subduction settings without a continental lithosphere in which to crystallize. The second suite consists of mantle lithospheric diamonds from the Zimbabwe craton, which will be used to test whether the earliest, most depleted mantle keels could have formed diamonds directly without the metasomatism or re-fertilization that is seen in the Kaapvaal craton to the south.