The GIA (Geoscience Impact Award) for 2020 goes to Nicole Meyer for her discovery for a new mineral, formally recognised as Goldschmidtite in July of 2018 and published in American Mineralogist in September 2019.
Nicole is a PhD student working on a suite of South African diamonds from the Koffiefontein pipe. Her project uses an elemental and isotopic approach to understand how, when, and where diamonds formed. From the micron-sized minerals included in diamonds to the host diamond, she has used many geochemical techniques to better understand the chemical environment of the Earth's mantle at the time of the diamond formation 3.3 billion years ago. During this project she was fortunate to discover a brand new mineral, which she named goldschmidtite after Victor Moritz Goldschmidt.