Julie Prytulak, Imperial College London, UK
2017 Houtermans Award medallist
Julie Prytulak is a Lecturer in the Earth Science and Engineering Department at Imperial College London. Julie is Canadian, with many formative years spent in the wide expanse of the Saskatchewan prairies before she received a B.Sc honors degree in Geology from Carleton University, Ottawa in 2002. She then moved across the continent and into the USA to complete an M.S. degree at Washington State University in 2004, working with Jeff Vervoort on the Hf-Nd isotope composition of subducting sediments. A relocation to the United Kingdom followed, and she received a PhD in 2008 from Bristol University, where she used short-lived uranium-series isotopes, (231Pa in particular), to determine the melt productivity beneath ocean islands with Tim Elliott. She then held a postdoctoral position at Oxford University, followed by a NERC fellowship at Oxford and Imperial College London. During her time at Oxford (2008-2011) she developed, alongside Sune Nielsen and Alex Halliday, the first protocol to precisely and accurately measure natural stable vanadium isotope variations. In 2013 she joined the faculty at Imperial College London as co-leader (with M. Rehkamper, D. Weiss and T. van de Flierdt) of the Mass Spectrometry and Geochemistry (MAGIC) isotope group.
Julie’s research can be broadly described as igneous geochemistry, and she employs an array of techniques including major and trace elements, radiogenic isotopes and most recently stable isotopes. Her primary research investigates the drivers of mantle melting and the subsequent evolution of such melts, most notably in intraplate and island arc settings. Her recent work focuses on the causes of stable isotope variations in vanadium and thallium during magmatic processes. In collaboration with many valued petrological, geochemical and geophysical colleagues, she aims to determine whether stable isotope variations in magmas are related to intensive source parameters such as oxygen fugacity, are dominated by crystal chemical controls and thus reflect mantle lithology, or are resultant from the input of isotopically exotic components.
Additional information and a list of publications can be found here.