During her first years as an undergraduate student at Denison University, Jemila Edmond, fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, was studying communications. It wasn’t until she took a geology class that she realized she had a passion for learning how things work and the mechanics of earth and planet building. 

“All of the things I didn’t know blew me away,” Edmond said about her elective course. “ It was a whole new world of knowledge and learning.”

Now, Edmond is working on a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) with her advisor James Van Orman for her research project titled, “The fate of banded iron formations in the deep mantle”.

“I am hoping that the work that I do will make a big impact on the way we understand the earth,” she said. “This is an area that people haven’t paid a lot of attention to, but the consequences of experiments like these have big implications on what we know about the earth and geology.”

This NSF grant gives Edmond the opportunity to study banded iron formations, the most important iron ore source in the world. Years ago, these formations were covering the ocean floors, but now, there are only small pieces of them in existence as they’ve been subducted into the earth’s mantle. Edmond will use this grant to better understand what this means and how it happens.

“This department is such a hidden gem,” Edmond said. “It’s so diverse and everyone works so well together. I feel lucky to be here.”