Martha Pamato is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of Geosciences.

Martha graduated from the University of Padua with a B.Sc. in Geological Sciences in 2008 and then moved to Germany where she obtained both her M.Sc. (2010) and PhD (2014) in Experimental Geosciences at the Bayerisches Geoinstitut, University of Bayreuth. As a Postdoctoral Research Associate she spent a year in the United States at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (IL) and then moved to the University College London (UK) in 2015. Martha was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) fellowship in 2018 and moved to the University of Padua in 2019. Her scientific efforts have been recently recognized with the “Ugo Panichi Prize” from the Italian Society of Mineralogy and Petrology (in 2018) and the Dr. Eduard Gübelin Research Scholarship, Dr. Eduard Gübelin Association for Research & Identification of Precious Stones (in 2020).

Martha is a mineral physicist specialized in studying the behaviour of minerals under extreme pressure and temperature conditions such as those encountered in the Earth’s inaccessible mantle and core. With an interdisciplinary geological background, she combines experimental and theoretical methods with the study of natural specimens, to understand the structure and composition of the deep Earth and its evolution into a habitable planet. In 2021, she obtained an ERC Starting grant for the project INHERIT (2022-2027), which aims to determine Earth’s primordial hydrogen isotopic signature and content of a unique set of worldwide, natural diamonds dating 3.5 to 0.09 billion years. The new results will be fundamental to pinpoint Earth’s water origin with long-term implications for understanding planet habitability, in our Solar System and beyond.