Awards & Special Lectures

The European Association of Geochemistry, through its awards, fellowships and special lectures, seeks to recognize outstanding contributions to geochemistry. The honors bestowed on our awardees recognize exceptional contributions at different career stages (see the criteria for individual awards below). We are committed to promoting the diversity of our awardees, to recognizing a wide range of different types of exceptional contribution, and we acknowledge the different career paths that lead to the achievement of such contributions.

2026 Medallists

2026 H.C. Urey Award

Ray F Weiss

Scripps Institution of Oceanography,

University of California San Diego, USA

Ray Weiss’s influence on the field of geochemistry over the arc of his career has extended from the ocean floor to the upper atmosphere. His development and application of rigorous and creative geochemical measurement techniques have advanced our understanding of ocean and deep lake circulation, hydrothermal vent geochemistry, gas solubilities in natural waters, and the global and regional distributions of atmospheric trace gases. His recent atmospheric work has led to numerous discoveries about atmospheric composition changes, with impacts on stratospheric ozone depletion, hydroxyl radical abundance, and global radiative forcing.
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2026 Science Innovation Award

Elizabeth Cottrell

National Museum of Natural History,

Smithsonian Institution, USA

Elizabeth Cottrell is recognized for her innovative and leading contributions in the study of the oxidation state of Earth’s mantle through the magmas that it produces, and the residues left behind, work that has led to transformative scientific advances and catalyzed a renaissance in the field.
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Photo by Phillip R. Lee, Smithsonian Institution

2026 F.G. Houtermans Award

Alan M. Seltzer

University College Dublin, Ireland

Alan Seltzer is recognized for his achievements in the fields of hydrology, marine chemistry, climate science, and mantle geochemistry. In particular, he developed novel ultra-high precision analytical methods, which led to important recent discoveries in these fields of study.
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EAG Awards

H.C. Urey Award: the society’s highest honor, recognizes outstanding contributions advancing geochemistry over a career. The award is based on scientific excellence as well as the broader impacts candidates have made in their careers to date.

Science Innovation Award: recognizes mid-career scientists who have recently made an important and innovative breakthrough in geochemistry.

F.G. Houtermans Award: recognizes exceptional contributions to geochemistry by an early career scientist.

Distinguished Service Award: recognizes outstanding service made to the geochemical community, exceeding the expectations of normal service. Nominations are made by the EAG Council.

Joint EAG-GS Awards and Special Lectures

The following are jointly presented by the EAG and the Geochemical Society:

Geochemistry Fellows: honors outstanding scientists who have made major contributions to the field of geochemistry. The award is based on scientific excellence as well as the broader impacts candidates have made in their careers to date.

P. Gast Lectureship: recognizes to a mid-career scientist for outstanding contributions to geochemistry. Nominations are made by the EAG Council and GS Board.

R. Berner Lecture: recognizes a mid-career scientist on a topic associated with elemental cycling at the Earth’s surface.

An “outstanding / exceptional / profound contribution(s)” encompasses one or various combinations of the following contributions:

a series of publications (including any combination of papers, edited volumes, authored books, written reports, other writing) that represents outstanding contribution
an innovative breakthrough
teaching and training the next generation of geochemists
improvements to infrastructure and techniques
capacity building - especially in developing countries or emerging disciplines
significant contributions to building of the community such as through meeting organisation, building peer-networking groups, other positive initiatives, and tangible efforts that advance diversity, equity, and inclusion
work with policy makers to ensure that their decisions are grounded in rigorous science
curation of significant sample collections and databases of long-term scientific value
communication of the intrinsic excitement of our field to the general public, where innovative and / or connecting with traditionally underrepresented or underserved people will be considered a plus
exceptional editorial contributions

Career Paths

The European Association of Geochemistry recognizes that there are diverse research career paths, as well as the challenges of managing a research career alongside other personal commitments, possible chronic illness, and/or disability. When reviewing applicants’ eligibility and research experience, the societies will take into consideration - where reported with brevity in nomination packages - time spent working on a part-time basis and/or outside of the research environment. If a nominee has been reported to have worked part-time, they should briefly state the percentage of full-time equivalent hours that they observed and the time period it pertains to.

Where nominees have had a career break, worked outside of scientific research (where relevant to the nominee’s assessment category), taken formal periods of maternity, paternity shared parental and adoptive leave as the primary care giver, or extended/repeated sick or bereavement leave, this will be taken account of by awards committees. Each case will be considered individually.

Ray F Weiss, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, USA

Recipient of the 2026 Urey Award

RAY F. WEISS is a Distinguished Professor of Geochemistry Emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, where he has been for 62 years. For roughly the first half of his academic career his research focused on chemical tracers in oceanography and on applying analytical chemistry methods to this research. Among his earlier contributions were the systematic quantification of gas solubilities in water and seawater that are still used today. His remote sampling of elevated temperature near-bottom waters at the Galapagos spreading center in the Eastern Pacific for measurements of helium isotopes and other geochemical tracers provided the first proof-of-existence of deep-sea hydrothermal vents. In the Weddell Sea, he carried out the first geochemical study of the sub-surface and ice-edge Antarctic mixing processes that play a major role in deep water formation for the world oceans. And in the wider Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans, he and his students and postdocs developed the practical application of measuring dissolved atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons to determine the rates of ventilation, transport and mixing in the deep oceans. These studies included the first applications of time-dependent tracers in deep western boundary currents and deep equatorial countercurrents. This aquatic tracer work was also expanded to studies of mixing rates and biological productivity in deep temperate lakes, and to an improved understanding of how the P-V-T properties of water control deep mixing in these lakes.

Since many of the time-dependent tracers used in oceanography come from the atmosphere, and with the growing awareness of the environmental impacts of anthropogenic emissions to the atmosphere, the second half of Prof. Weiss’s research career shifted toward atmospheric trace gas research. He carried out the first accurate quantification of the global increase and latitudinal distribution of atmospheric nitrous oxide, an important greenhouse gas and stratospheric ozone depleting substance. With the discovery of the dominant role of chlorine- and bromine-bearing anthropogenic gases in the catalytic destruction of stratospheric ozone, and the resulting passage of the Montreal Protocol, it became important to verify by direct atmospheric measurement whether its resulting restrictions were being followed by the signatories. In 1990, Prof Weiss joined with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) colleague Prof. Ronald Prinn to lead the experimental component of the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), now a 13-nation collaboration to measure and model the distributions and lifetimes of more than 55 chemically and radiatively important trace gases emitted into the global and regional atmosphere. AGAGE has played a major role in the discovery and quantification of unreported or under-reported emissions, especially from East Asia, and in showing that some of these spurious emissions have subsequently been remediated.

Prof. Weiss has mentored graduate students and postdocs who now research and teach atmospheric and oceanic chemistry around the globe. He has authored or co-authored 273 research publications, and he has served on a wide range of advisory and review committees. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Photo by Phillip R. Lee, Smithsonian Institution

Elizabeth Cottrell, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, USA

2026 Science Innovation Award medallist - Ted Ringwood Medal

Liz Cottrell is a Research Geologist and Curator in the Department of Mineral Sciences, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, USA. She is best known for her work on mantle processes, most notably those related to mantle redox. Liz received her Bachelor of Science from Brown University (1997) where she learned how to buffer cold seal experiments under the mentorship of Mac Rutherford. With her first passport she flew to Paris as a Fulbright Fellow where she fell in love with France and ran tank experiments with Claude Jaupart. Liz received her PhD (2004) at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, under the mentorship of Dave Walker. Her thesis focused on the behavior of siderophile elements during planetary core formation. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution, she joined the staff of the Smithsonian (2006).

While at Carnegie, Liz had the good fortune to overlap with Katie Kelley. Liz and Katie applied XANES spectroscopy to quantify the oxidation state of iron in silicate glasses. They upwardly revised the Fe³⁺/Fe²⁺ ratio of MORB and elucidated systematic behaviors of Fe³⁺ during mantle melting and basalt differentiation. They showed that the oxygen fugacity recorded by primitive and minimally degassed basaltic melts correlates with geochemical tracers of subduction influence – a line of inquiry that later flourished under the leadership of their student, Maryjo Brounce.

Liz became interested in the role of ferric iron in petrogenetic processes from melting at mid-ocean ridges to calc-alkaline differentiation. A collaboration with postdoctoral fellow Fred Davis inspired a return to the lab to refine experimental techniques for controlling oxygen fugacity in high pressure experiments and to quantify ferric iron partitioning between minerals and melts. This work proved highly synergistic with projects to understand arc petrogenesis with postdocs Megan Holycross and Michelle Muth and with Liz’s exploration of sea floor peridotites as archives of mantle oxygen fugacity. In collaboration with Jessica Warren, a series of papers led by their student, Suzanne Birner, deciphered mantle processes that have generated orders of magnitude variation in the oxygen fugacity of peridotites, with broad implications for the history of Earth’s interior and atmosphere.

Liz has served on the Geochemical Society’s board of directors and as the president of the Geological Society of Washington. She is a Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America (2016) and a Geochemistry Fellow of the Geochemical Society and the European Association for Geochemistry (2023). She cherishes her community of mentors, collaborators, postdocs, students, and interns.

Alan M. Seltzer, University College Dublin, Ireland

2026 Houtermans Award medallist

Alan Seltzer is an Assistant Professor in the School of Earth Sciences at University College Dublin and an affiliated scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), where he leads an isotope tracer laboratory. His research uses naturally occurring gas isotopes to quantify physical and biogeochemical processes across the Earth system, with applications spanning groundwater hydrogeology, terrestrial paleoclimate, air-sea gas exchange, mantle volatile transport, and nitrogen cycling in aquatic environments.

Alan was first introduced to geochemistry as a high school intern in the soil biogeochemistry laboratory of Jason Neff at the University of Colorado Boulder. He completed a B.A. in Earth Science and Computer Science at Columbia University in 2014, conducting research across multiple laboratories at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Working with Martin Stute and Joerg Schaefer, he developed a lasting interest in noble gases as physical tracers through a project reconstructing groundwater recharge temperatures in New Zealand since the last ice age.

He pursued his Ph.D. at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 2014 to 2019 under the mentorship of Jeff Severinghaus. During his doctoral research, Alan developed a dynamic dual-inlet isotope-ratio mass spectrometry technique to measure dissolved Ar, Kr, and Xe isotopes in groundwater at sub-per-mil precision to resolve gravitational fractionation at the ~0.005‰/amu level as a proxy for paleo-water-table depth. He applied this approach to reconstruct declining groundwater levels in the southwestern United States during the last deglaciation. In parallel, in collaboration with Roberta Hamme and Frank Pavia, he adapted the technique to investigate noble-gas disequilibrium in the deep ocean as a quantitative tracer of air-sea gas exchange.

From 2019 to 2021, Alan was a postdoctoral scholar at WHOI under the mentorship of Peter Barry and Roo Nicholson. Working with Barry, Michael Broadley, David Bekaert, and Bernard Marty, he extended the dynamic noble gas isotope technique to high-precision measurements of Ar, Kr, and Xe isotopes in volcanic gas emissions, enabling new constraints on volcanic gas histories and transport in the coupled solid Earth-atmosphere system. In 2021, Alan joined the scientific staff in WHOI’s Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry Department and established a laboratory focused on noble gas, nitrogen, and oxygen isotopes in groundwater, seawater, air, and volcanic gases. Through collaboration with Bill Jenkins, he expanded oceanic applications of noble-gas tracers for air-sea exchange and glacial meltwater input. More recently, together with his student Katelyn McPaul and colleague Scott Wankel, he has adapted these approaches for high-precision N₂ isotope measurements in groundwater, advancing tools to quantify nitrogen cycling in aquatic systems.

Since 2025, Alan has been a faculty member at University College Dublin, where he serves as Assistant Professor of Hydrogeology and Ad Astra Fellow, leading a research programme focused on tracer-based approaches to understanding groundwater systems.

Additional information and a list of publications can be found here.