Miaki Ishii received her Hon.B.Sc. in physics from the University of Toronto, and completed her Ph.D. in geophysics at Harvard University.  She was a Green Scholar at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD before returning to Harvard University as a faculty.  Her research interests include studies of deep Earth's interior as well as giant earthquakes.

The Earth's inner core, buried more than 5000 km beneath the surface, is a difficult target to study due to its remoteness as well as the high-temperature and high-pressure conditions.  The solid inner core exhibits peculiar characteristics of seismic anisotropy (dependence of seismic wave speed on the propagation direction) that is not observed for most of the Earth's interior.  The anisotropy in the shallow part of the inner core shows strong lateral dependence, but significant changes in anisotropy are observed with depth which led to the discovery of the innermost inner core.    The recent advances in numerical calculations at high-temperature/pressure conditions are starting to provide mineral physics constraints on the properties of iron alloy that can be compared with seismological observations.  Based upon such comparison, we present a new scenario for crystal alignment and evolution of the inner core.