New Mineral Named After a University of Utah Geologist

Barbara Nash, a professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah, has had a new mineral named in her honor. The mineral was discovered in 2010 in abandoned uranium mines in Colorado and Utah by Joe Marty, a retired medical technologist at the University of Utah School of Medicine. Marty and his colleagues decided to call the new mineral “nashite” because of Professor Nash’s work on similar minerals.

Dr. Nash has been the director of the Electron Microprobe Laboratory at the University of Utah since 1970. She holds bachelor’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley.