Science Innovation Award

About the Science Innovation Award

The EAG Science Innovation Award recognizes scientists who have recently made a particularly important and innovative breakthrough in all fields of geochemistry. The geochemical research must be highly original and contribute in a significant fashion to our understanding of the natural behavior of the Earth or planets.

The award is presented annually at the Goldschmidt Conference and consists of an engraved medal, an honorarium (1000 Euros), a certificate and inclusion as a Geochemistry Fellow.

Based on their field, award recipients will receive one of the following medals:

Alfred Edward “Ted” Ringwood Medal honoring his work in petrology and mineral physics
Heinz Lowenstam Medal honoring his work in biogeochemistry
Nicholas Shackleton Medal honoring his work in climatology
Samuel Epstein Medal honoring his work in isotope geochemistry
Werner Stumm Medal honoring his work in low temperature and surface geochemistry

Award eligibility: candidates must have received a recognized doctorate within 25 years of the first day of the year in which the award is given. For the 2027 Science Innovation Award, nominees must have received a PhD on/after 1 January 2002.
However, we are committed to promoting the diversity of our candidates and acknowledge that they may have different career paths therefore exceptions to the eligibility criteria may be made.
Nominations of underrepresented groups are encouraged.

Candidates may not be nominated if they are a member of the EAG Council or of the Science Innovation Award Committee.

Photo by Phillip R. Lee, Smithsonian Institution

Recipient of the 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. Read more

The 2026 Science Innovation medal, named in honor of Alfred Edward “Ted” Ringwood, will be presented at the Goldschmidt 2026 Conference in Montréal in July.

Former recipients of the Science Innovation Award

2025Christine Putnis, University of Münster, Germany – Werner Stumm Medal – Citation by Michael Hochella, Acceptance and award lecture by Christine Putnis.
2024 Evelyn Füri, Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques (CNRS – UL), France – Samuel Epstein Medal – Citation by Marc Chaussidon, Acceptance and Award Lecture by Evelyn Füri.
2023 Rosalind Rickaby, University of Oxford, UK – Nicholas Shackleton Medal – Citation by Adina Paytan with Acceptance and Award Lecture by Rosalind Rickaby
2022 Lenny Winkel, ETH Zürich, Switzerland – Heinz Lowenstam Medal – Citation by Janet Hering and Acceptance by Lenny Winkel
2021 Fabrice Gaillard, Institute of Earth Sciences at Orléans, France – Ted Ringwood Medal – Citation (video) by Jannick Ingrin and Acceptance (video) by Fabrice Gaillard
2020 Kevin Rosso, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA – Werner Stumm Medal – Citation by Benjamin Gilbert and Mike Hochella and Acceptance by Kevin Rosso
2019 Ariel Anbar, Arizona State University, USA – Samuel Epstein Medal – Citation by Tim Lyons and Acceptance by Ariel Anbar
2018 Jess Adkins, Caltech, USA – Nicholas Shackleton Medal
2017 Bo Thamdrup, University of Southern Denmark – Heinz Lowenstam Medal
2016 Jon Blundy, University of Bristol, UK – Ted Ringwood Medal
2015 Philippe Van Cappellen, University of Waterloo, Canada – Werner Stumm Medal
2014 James Farquhar, University of Maryland, USA – Samuel Epstein Medal
2013 Jérôme Chappellaz, French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and University Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France – Nicholas Shackleton Medal
2012 Katherine Freeman, PennState University, USA and Daniel Sigman, Princeton University, USA – Heinz Lowenstam Medal
2011 Kei Hirose, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan – Ted Ringwood Medal
2010 William H. Casey, UC Davis, USA – Werner Stumm Medal
2009 John M. Eiler, Caltech, USA – Samuel Epstein Medal
2008 R. Lawrence Edwards, University of Minnesota, USA – Nicholas Shackleton Medal

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.

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.

Christine Putnis, University of Münster, Germany

2025 Science Innovation Award medallist - Werner Stumm Medal

Christine V. Putnis is a geochemist working in the Institute for Mineralogy in the University of Münster, Germany where she has an apl Professor position. Since moving to Germany from Cambridge (UK) in 1996, she has carried out research using experimental and analytical methods, mainly atomic force microscopy, to investigate reactions at the mineral-fluid interface, specifically the mechanism of interface-coupled dissolution-precipitation and the formation of nanoparticles as a mechanism of crystal growth. The significance of this mechanism in the removal of toxic elements from solution, as a process for environmental remediation, has been presented in numerous publications. Effectively this research starts at the nanoscale and bridges the gap between nano-, micro- and large-scale Earth processes.

Evelyn Füri, Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques - CNRS - UL, France

2024 Science Innovation Award medallist

Evelyn Füri is a Chargée de Recherche (junior researcher) at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She was first trained in isotope geochemistry during her diploma studies at the Department of Earth Sciences at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. She then moved to sunny San Diego where she completed a Ph.D. in Earth Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2010. After studying the noble gas geochemistry of various types of terrestrial samples such as subglacial and submarine basalts, geothermal fluids, and fumarolic gases, she decided to broaden her expertise by turning her attention to extraterrestrial samples. To this end, she obtained a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship from the French National Space Agency (CNES) to analyze light noble gases trapped in cometary material returned by NASA's Stardust mission at the noble gas facility of the Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques (CRPG, rainy Nancy, France). In parallel, she was trained in using secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) to analyze meteorites as well as lunar samples collected during the Apollo missions. In 2014, she obtained a permanent CNRS researcher position at CRPG.

Evelyn’s main research objectives are to improve our understanding of the origin of noble gases and light elements (H, C, N) on Earth and other planetary bodies in the inner Solar System. Her work has also provided new insights on the behavior, distribution, and inventory of these elements in deep planetary reservoirs. Recently, Evelyn and her team developed novel methodologies in both noble gas mass spectrometry and SIMS techniques to analyze nitrogen isotopes in meteorites, samples brought back to Earth by space missions, and synthetic samples. Measurements of noble gases in various extraterrestrial samples provided additional constraints on modifications of light element isotope ratios induced by the solar wind and cosmic radiation during space exposure. Finally, Evelyn has been collaborating with researchers at CRPG and other national and international institutes to better understand the effects of various phyico-chemical parameters on the solubility and isotopic fractionation of nitrogen during planetary differentiation.

As a member of the ‘Hayabusa2 Initial Analysis Volatile Team’, Evelyn analyzed noble gases and nitrogen in both gas and solid samples collected on the asteroid Ryugu. She is also part of the sample science team of the OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned samples from the asteroid Bennu in 2023. In addition, Evelyn was part of the science core team of the Emirates Lunar Mission, which, unfortunately, experienced an unsuccessful landing on the Moon in 2023.

Evelyn received the CNRS bronze medal in 2017 and was awarded ERC Starting and Consolidator grants in 2016 and 2022, respectively. Thanks to her expertise in isotope geochemistry, cosmochemistry, and sample return missions, Evelyn has been solicited to give invited and keynote talks at several international conferences and workshops. She also regularly engages in public outreach activities, for example as part of the association “Les p’tits cueilleurs d’étoiles”, whose goal is to playfully introduce the world of planets and space to hospitalized children.

Rosalind Rickaby, University of Oxford, UK

2023 Science Innovation Award medallist

Ros Rickaby is a marine biogeochemist, currently the Chair of Geology at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, having been Professor of Biogeochemistry since 2010, on the dark side (of blue!), as well as mum to two boys. She received her PhD with Harry Elderfield from Cambridge University in 1995 and studied at Harvard for her post-doc with Dan Schrag before being appointed to a Lectureship in Oxford in 2002. Ros has won 20 years of continuous ERC funding, and been recognised by prestigious medals from the European Geosciences and American Geophysical Union, and Geological Society of London. She held a Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society and was just last year appointed FRS.

Ros’ overarching theme is to use the past co-evolution of life, environmental chemistry, and Earth’s climate to inform predictions of future change. Ros has pioneered an interdisciplinary blend of biology and chemistry to define the evolving role of the mineralising phytoplankton, in driving climate. Her highest impact research has unravelled the interplay between their adaptation and the carbon cycle over timescales ranging from millions to 100s of years. She has turned on its head the common perception that biology clouds interpretation of biomineral proxy records, by demonstrating that signals of palaeophysiology can be recovered from those “complications”. Understanding the feedback between biology and climate requires investigation of both biological innovation and environmental change over Earth history. Ros’ distinctive approach is to read geological history from signals of adaptation within genes of modern organisms, which play out in the evolving affinity and kinetics of the expressed enzymes, or isotopic signals of adaptation that leave a footprint in fossils and biomolecules. Ros has authored over 120 papers and co-authored a book “Evolution’s Destiny: Co-evolving chemistry of the environment and life”.

Ros’ efficacy as a communicator has been recognised through numerous invited and keynote talks around the world including the Paul Gast Lecture of the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society. Dedicated to outreach, she published an essay for primary school age children entitled “Oceans on Earth” in “George and the Blue Moon” by Lucy Hawking. She has appeared in the award-winning documentary “Thin Ice”, a short video for the “Hay Levels” series, in a YouTube film “Adaptability” to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Phil. Trans Roy. Soc., and in an Audible audiobook “A Grown-up Guide to the Oceans”. Ros believes her greatest impact has been as an effective scientific mentor to brilliant young scientists with whom she has been so lucky to work. 18 of her 33 Masters students have gone on to PhDs; and 12 of the 20 graduates and 18 post-docs trained in Rickaby’s group now hold faculty positions in leading institutes around the world.

Lenny Winkel, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

2022 Science Innovation Award medallist

Lenny Winkel is an associate professor of Inorganic Environmental Geochemistry at ETH Zürich and Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. Lenny did her undergraduate studies in Geology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and completed her PhD on the thermal decomposition of copper sulfides in the Solar Technology Laboratory at Paul Scherrer Institute and ETH Zurich, under the supervision of Terry Seward. She subsequently did a postdoc project at Eawag with Michael Berg, Annette Johnson and Stephan Hug predicting large-scale groundwater contamination of the harmful element arsenic using geospatial modelling approaches. Their work on geogenic contamination of groundwater was extensively covered by international press and in 2019 awarded with the Swiss Chemical Society (SCG) Sandmeyer award.

After further postdoctoral research in France, the UK and Greece in the framework of the EU-funded project AquaTRAIN aimed at studying the behaviour and environmental impact of geogenic elements, Lenny was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship in 2011 for her project on the global biogeochemical cycle of the trace element selenium. This research resulted in key insights into the biogeochemical selenium cycle. Lenny and her research group demonstrated that atmospheric deposition plays a key role in the terrestrial distribution of selenium. Furthermore, she developed and used innovative methods to measure fluxes of gaseous selenium and discovered that gaseous emissions of selenium are important pathways that could lead to environmental redistribution of selenium. Her further research projects involve multi-scale investigations of trace element behavior in and across various environmental compartments, including marine waters, the atmosphere and soils using experimental, analytical and modeling approaches.

Lenny’s research is internationally recognized, as evidenced by publications in top-ranked scientific disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals as well as invitations for plenary and keynote talks to internationally renowned conferences. Based on her outstanding research contributions to geochemistry and the ability to clearly communicate these contributions to a broad audience, she was selected as the EAG Distinguished Lecturer in 2017.

Apart from her research, Lenny is also a dedicated advisor and teacher, and two of her former PhD students recently received the ETH Medal for an outstanding doctoral thesis. In 2019, Lenny won the Goldene Eule (Golden Owl) Award for exceptional and excellent teaching at ETH Zürich and she was appointed as a didactic fellow at ETH in the same year.

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

Fabrice Gaillard, Institute of Earth Sciences at Orléans, France

2021 Science Innovation Award medallist

Fabrice Gaillard is an experimental geochemist and geophysicist with a consolidated background in petrology and chemical thermodynamics. He is best known for his contributions to the understanding of volatile elements in magmatic systems with implications for the mantle and crust geodynamics, but he also contributed to model mantle degassing and its relationships with atmospheric evolution on Earth and beyond. He received his B.S. degree in Geological Sciences at the University of Grenoble in 1996, and his M.S. degree and PhD degrees at the University of Orléans in 1997 and 2001, respectively. He has been postdoc research associates at the Bayerisches GeoInstitut (BGI, 2001-2005). In 2005 he joined the CNRS (French national centre for scientific research), and since then he has been working at the ISTO (Institute of Earth Sciences at Orléans). In 2015, he obtained the highest French degree, the “habilitation à diriger des recherches”, and became director of research at CNRS in 2018. Since 2017, he is head of the “MAGMA” group at ISTO. Fabrice has coordinated 3 ANR grants (French agency for research) and 1 ERC project (European research council). He has supervised 6 PhD students and 7 postdoctoral research associates.

Part of Fabrice’s research has aimed at reconciling geophysical imaging of the Earth’s interior with petrological and geochemical models. There is indeed a gap between mineral physics models that inspire geophysical interpretations and petrological models that inspire geochemical interpretations. The experimental efforts led by Fabrice’s group significantly bridged this gap by providing laboratory constraints on the electrical conductivity of a variety of volatile-bearing melts. Thanks to this work, the complexity arising from the diversity and the multicomponent nature of deep magmas could be converted into a range of values of electrical conductivity. This methodology, friendly named “electrical petrology”, has been applied to remotely decipher magmatic processes in the mantle and the crust from oceanic to collisional settings, including arc settings. Another side of Fabrice’s research has been dedicated to the modelling of magmatic degassing and its impact on the chemistry of planetary surfaces. This work has shown that a significant part of the diversity of planetary surficial chemistry can be related to the diversity of composition of volcanic gases. Knowledge of the volatile abundances and redox state of the planetary interiors can render planetary surface chemistry predictable. Lastly, Fabrice has been recently working on the more immediate aspect of metal resources associated to magmatism. He addresses, by means of experimental petrology, the fate of rare metals, rare earth and chalcophile elements during magmatic differentiation and ore formation in basaltic to carbonatitic intrusions.

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

Kevin Rosso, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA

2020 Science Innovation Award medallist

Kevin Rosso is a geochemist best known for his pioneering research on electron transfer reactions between aqueous ions, mineral surfaces, and bacterial enzymes. He received his B.S. degree in Geological Sciences from Cal Poly Pomona in 1992, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Geochemistry from Virginia Tech in 1994 and 1998. Since that time his career has been based at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where after starting as an early career research scientist was promoted through to its highest senior rank of Laboratory Fellow by 2010. As the Associate Director of the Physical Sciences Division for Geochemistry since 2006, he has been leading a research group of approximately 40 staff scientists, post-doctoral fellows, and visiting Ph.D. students. Kevin is also the lead principal investigator of the U.S. Department of Energy’s fundamental geochemistry research program at PNNL.

Kevin’s research and his many collaborative studies are well recognized as being at the center of the fields of molecular geochemistry and nanogeoscience, fields he helped create in graduate school with the emergence of advanced tools such as scanning probe microscopies, quantum mechanical molecular simulations, and massively parallel supercomputers. Beginning with topics such as metal sulfide oxidation, bacterial reduction of metal oxides, contaminant interactions at mineral/water interfaces, and mechanisms of crystal growth and dissolution, his research expanded into exploring mechanisms of geologic carbon sequestration, stress corrosion cracking in alloys, and performance optimization of solid-state energy storage materials and solar photocatalysts. Kevin was one of the first to unveil the process of mineral surface oxidation atom by atom, and he led the development of computational molecular simulations in the framework of Marcus theory to predict rates of redox reactions observable at the macroscopic scale in geochemical and biogeochemical systems.

To date, Kevin has published over 320 papers and book chapters, a body of work with about 14,000 citations and an H-index of 59. He has been the primary mentor of 24 post-doctoral fellows and 20 graduate students. He is a regularly invited speaker, with over 100 distinguished lectures delivered at University colloquia, workshops, and conferences internationally. Kevin won the Mineralogical Society of America Award in 2004, where he serves as Life Fellow, Virginia Tech’s Outstanding Recent Alumnus Award in 2009, and the Mineralogical Society’s Hallimond Lectureship in 2016. He has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Manchester and at the University of Grenoble, and currently is an Adjunct Professor at the University of New South Wales. Kevin was an Associate Editor for American Mineralogist in 2004-2006, for Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta in 2008-2011, and currently serves on the Editorial Board of ACS Earth and Space Chemistry. He has regularly served on U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. National Academies panels and committees to set the national research agenda, and he was a member of the International Advisory Board for the Thomas Young Centre at University College London. In 2019 he accepted a Visiting Distinguished Scholar appointment at Durham University, and was inducted into the Washington State Academy of Sciences.

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

Ariel Anbar, Arizona State University, USA

2019 Samuel Epstein Science Innovation Award medallist

Ariel Anbar is a scientist and educator interested in Earth’s past and future as an inhabited world, and the prospects for life beyond. He is a President’s Professor at Arizona State University on the faculty of the School of Earth & Space Exploration and the School of Molecular Sciences, and a Distinguished Sustainability Scholar in ASU’s Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability. In science, he and his teams have published over 140 refereed papers on topics ranging from the origins of Earth’s atmosphere to detecting life on other worlds to diagnosing human disease. He directed ASU’s Astrobiology Program from 2009 – 2015. In education, Ariel directs ASU’s Center for Education Through Exploration, which is reinventing digital learning around curiosity, exploration, and discovery.

Ariel arrived at ASU in 2004 after receiving an A.B. in Geological Sciences and Chemistry from Harvard in 1989 and a Ph.D. in Geochemistry at Caltech in 1996, and after spending 8 years on the faculty of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Rochester. At Harvard, guided by Dick Holland and a suggestion from his father, Michael Anbar, Ariel conducted experiments that demonstrated the potential importance of photochemical oxidation in Archean oceans, especially as a possible source of manganese oxides before the Great Oxidation Event (“GOE”). At Caltech, Ariel worked primarily in Gerry Wasserburg’s “Lunatic Asylum”, working with Rob Creaser and Dimtri Papanastassiou to develop and apply ultra-sensitive negative thermal ionization MS methods to accurately determine the concentrations of rhenium and iridium in seawater. He also worked with Yuk Yung and Mark Allen on several modeling studies of Martian and terrestrial atmospheric chemistry.

After graduate school, first at Rochester and then at ASU, Ariel advanced a team-and-collaboration-based approach to innovation. Helped by Jane Barling and Gwyneth Gordon, Ariel established a research group that pioneered the use of MC-ICP-MS to discover, characterize, and apply natural variations in the stable isotope abundances of transition metals. This research was inspired by the potential of “non-traditional” stable isotope systems as biomarkers and as probes of ancient ocean oxygenation, developed through early interactions with Francis Albarède, Sue Brantley, Tom Bullen, Tim Lyons, Ken Nealson, and Greg Ravizza, as well as by novel ideas about the evolutionary consequences of redox-driven changes in metal availability in ancient oceans developed first with Andy Knoll, and later with graduate student Jennifer Glass and postdoc Felisa Wolfe-Simon.

Ariel’s research group was the first to report natural fractionation of molybdenum isotopes. Led by Barling, and later by Laura Wasylenki in collaboration with Tom Spiro’s group, they discovered how and why molybdenum isotopes fractionate during adsorption to manganese oxides, providing a foundation for the use of this isotopes system to study ancient ocean redox change. A cohort of graduate students and postdocs, including Gail Arnold, Tais Dahl, Yun Duan, and Brian Kendall, as well as many collaborators, worked with Ariel to apply this new isotope system to probe key hypotheses about the timing and tempo of environmental oxygenation, especially in Precambrian carbonaceous shales. With Roger Buick he co-organized a broad team, supported by NASA, to obtain and analyze pristine sediments from just before the GOE, discovering multiple lines of isotopic and other evidence of an early “whiff” of O2 – a discovery which heralded a new wave of research using inorganic proxies to understand the early production of O2 in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans.

Ariel’s group, with Brantley, Spiro, and Stefan Weyer, also conducted key early work on iron isotopes, demonstrating abiotic fractionation in low and high temperature systems, and advancing our theoretical understanding of equilibrium redox fractionation effects.

More recently, Ariel collaborated with Stefan Weyer and then Tom Algeo and Achim Herrmann to develop the uranium isotope system as a paleoredox proxy. Led by graduate students Greg Brennecka and Stephen Romaniello – later joined by Xinming Chen and Feifei Zhang and postdoc Geoff Gilleaudeau – Ariel’s group opened up the carbonate sedimentary record for investigation of changes in ocean oxygenation and their linkages to evolution. Exciting emerging paleoredox projects attempt to calibrate the magnitude and extent of the “whiff” of O2 through pyrite weathering experiments led by graduate student Aleisha Johnson, as well as through the combination of thallium and molybdenum isotope systems in a partnership with Sune Nielsen and Jeremy Owens forged by graduate student Chad Ostrander. New insights into shallow water H2S come from mercury isotopes, led by postdoc Wang Zheng. All of these studies provide fodder for recent and ongoing creative collaborations between Ariel and colleagues in the solid Earth sciences community, funded by NSF, that are providing new insights into how interactions between Earth’s surface and interior shaped the early evolution of the surface redox environment.

Along the way, Ariel encouraged novel applications of the methods of isotope geoscience, particularly to the challenge of understanding and diagnosing human disease. Notably, inspired by the ideas of Joseph Skulan, and led by graduate student Jennifer Morgan, Ariel’s group worked with colleagues at NASA and the Mayo Clinic to develop calcium isotopes as a promising way to monitor and study bone disease. He also pursued environmental applications of iron and mercury isotope systematics with Pierre Herckes, postdoc Brian Majestic, and graduate student Chris Mead.

Ariel is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, which awarded him the Donath Medal in 2002, and was honored as a Fellow of the Geochemical Society and the European Association of Geochemistry in 2014. Ariel served as President-Elect and President of the Biogeosciences Section of the American Geophysical Union from 2015 – 2019. He was the Endowed Biogeochemistry Lecturer at the Goldschmidt Conference in 2017. He was appointed a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor in 2015 in recognition of his work in digital learning innovation, and in 2017 was named one of 10 “teaching innovators” by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Jess Adkins, Caltech, USA

2018 Nicholas Shackleton Science Innovation Award medallist

Jess Adkins is the Smits Family Professor of Geochemistry and Global Environmental Science in the Department of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech. He is a member of the Linde Center for Global Environmental Sciences and on the faculty of the Department of Engineering and Applied Science. Jess started at Caltech in 2000 after receiving a BS in Chemistry from Haverford College and a PhD in Chemical Oceanography from the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in 1998. At MIT Jess worked with Ed Boyle on developing deep-sea corals as a new archive of paleoclimate. They coupled U-series and radiocarbon dating as way to measure the past ventilation rate of the deep ocean and used stable isotope and trace metal records to document rapid climate change in the deep-sea. This work continues in the Adkins lab to this day. Between graduate school and Caltech, Jess was a Lamont Post-doc Fellow at LDEO and a NOAA Global Change Post-doc Fellow at the Universities of Minnesota and California, Irvine with Larry Edwards and Ellen Druffel. Early in his career Jess collaborated with Dan Schrag to measure the T/S plot for the deep ocean at the Last Glacial Maximum. This work has continued in the Adkins lab as an investigation of the density structure of the past water column and how novel observations fit with theories of the overturning circulation to explain the ocean’s role in glacial-interglacial climate change. Jess has worked on stalagmite records of tropical climate change, biomineralization mechanisms in corals, and iron isotopes in the modern ocean. Recently, together with Alex Sessions, Jess has lowered the detection limit for sulfur isotopes and developed a method for compound specific δ34S in organic matter using a MC-ICP-MS coupled to a GC. This has led to work on the sulfur cycle more generally, investigating the modern budget of river sulfur isotopes, ice core records of volcanic eruptions, and measuring the history of marine sulfate isotopic change from the Archean to the Cenozoic. In an ongoing collaboration with Will Berelson at USC, the Adkins group has measured the dissolution rate of calcite in seawater with a new techniques that is very precise even close to equilibrium. They have found that the enzyme carbonic anhydrase catalyzes the reaction between CO2 and CaCO3, thus providing new constraints on the dual effects of solution chemistry and surface energy on carbonate dissolution in the lab and in the ocean. Jess has used multiple deep submergence tools to explore the bottom of the ocean and has spent over 150 days at sea on expeditions to sample fossil deep-sea corals, take long sediment cores, and measure the in situ rate of carbonate dissolution in the water column.

Jess was awarded the Houtermans medal from the European Association of Geochemistry in 2003. He received the Ruth and Paul Fye MIT/WHOI and the Geochemical Society Best Paper Awards in 2005 and 2009 respectively. He was the Chow Lecturer at The Scripps Institute of Oceanography in 2017. Adkins was a Visiting Scientist at the LSCE in Gif-sur-Yvette, France in 2007.

Bo Thamdrup, University of Southern Denmark

2017 Heinz Lowenstam Science Innovation Award medallist

Bo Thamdrup is professor of geomicrobiology at the Department of Biology, University of Southern Denmark in Odense. Bo completed a M.Sc. in biology and chemistry, and a Ph.D. on the biogeochemical cycling of manganese, iron, and sulfur in marine sediments, at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and subsequently worked for five years as a researcher with Bo Barker Jørgensen at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen. He moved to Odense in 1998 where he was associated to the Danish Centre for Earth System Science and, subsequently, the Nordic Centre for Earth Evolution. Together with Don Canfield, Bo here had the opportunity to explore how microbes through their diverse metabolisms contribute to element cycling on local to global scales, and to Earth’s biogeochemical evolution. Bo’s contributions include quantification of the role of microbial iron and manganese reduction in the aquatic sediments, discovery of a new microbial metabolism: disproportionation of elemental sulfur as an important link in oxidative sulfur cycling, and the discovery, with Tage Dalsgaard, that anaerobic ammonium oxidation by anammox bacteria is an important sink for fixed nitrogen in natural environments. During the past decade, much of Bo’s research has focused on the geomicrobiology of oceanic oxygen minimum zones, particularly the distribution and interactions of microbial nitrogen transformations and, after the development of the highly sensitive STOX oxygen sensor by Niels Peter Revsbech, how these and other microbial processes are controlled by oxygen at nanomolar levels. Most recently, Bo has begun to explore the role of anaerobic methane oxidation as a sink for methane in freshwater systems and oxygen minimum zones.

Bo received the Elite Research Prize of the Danish Ministry of Science and Technology in 2007 and was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant in 2016.

Jon Blundy, University of Bristol

2016 Ted Ringwood Science Innovation Award medallist

Jon Blundy is Professor of Petrology in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, England. Jon came to Bristol in 1989 after completing a BA in Geology at University of Oxford (1983) and a PhD at University of Cambridge (1989), where he worked on the Adamello Batholith in the Italian Alps under the supervision of Steve Sparks. At Bristol Jon held consecutive independent research fellowships, from the Natural Environment Research Council (twice) and the Royal Society, for a total of 16 years, providing him with a great opportunity to pursue his interest in all things magmatic, using a combination of fieldwork, geochemical analysis, experimental petrology and thermodynamics. In 1990 he teamed up with Bernie Wood to work on the problem of trace element partitioning between crystals and melts. Their work confirmed the importance of ionic radius in controlling trace element incorporation and spawned the Lattice Strain Model of trace element partitioning, that has been widely used since to predict partition coefficients for geochemical modelling. Jon has also worked on mineral geothermometry, magma degassing, the phase relationships of subduction zone magmas, and hydrothermal ore deposits. Together with Kathy Cashman, Jon has explored many aspects of the Mount St. Helens magmatic system, exploting its potential as a natural laboratory for understanding magma dynamics beneath andesite volcanoes. In a 2006 paper with Steve Sparks and Catherine Annen Jon introduced the concept of Deep Crustal Hot Zones in generating the compositional diversity of magmas in the crust.

Jon has been a recipient of the F.W. Clarke Medal of the Geochemical Society (1997) and the Bigsby Medal of the Geological Society (2005). He has held visiting scholar positions at University of Oregon (1999), Nagoya University (2007) and California Institute of Technology, where he was Moore Scholar in 2014 and 2016. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2008 and the Academia Europea in 2011.

James Farquhar, University of Maryland

2014 Samuel Epstein Science Innovation Award medallist

James Farquhar is a Professor in ESSIC and the Department of Geology at the University of Maryland. After receiving a M.Sc. from the University of Chicago (1990) and a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta (1995), he was a Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Geophysical Laboratory (1995-1997) and an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at UCSD (1997-1999). In 2000 he was awarded the F. W. Clark Medal for work on oxygen and sulfur isotope anomalies in martian meteorites. In that year, he also published a paper (with Huiming Bao and Mark Thiemens) that described anomalous (mass-independent) fractionation of sulfur isotope in Earth’s early geological record, and joined the faculty of the University of Maryland in 2000. Since arriving at Maryland, Farquhar has held visiting positions/fellowships at the Biological Institute of the University of Southern Denmark, the MPI for Marine Microbiology, the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg, the IPG of Paris, and the IAS at the University of Western Australia.

Since 2000, Farquhar and his collaborators have extended research on the geologic record of sulfur isotopes, detailing the intricate fabric of minor isotope signatures that provide evidence for changes in atmospheric chemistry, the role of biology, and the larger coupling in the sulfur cycle between the atmospheric, oceanic, crustal, and even mantle reservoirs throughout much of Earth’s history. Together with Boswell Wing, David Johnston, and Don Canfield, Farquhar’s work took a second direction that revealed how smaller magnitude isotope signatures preserved by the minor sulfur isotopes could be used to place constraints on the transformations and flow of sulfur through metabolic and biogeochemical networks where mass-dependent reactions dominate. Current work by Farquhar and his collaborators is focusing on understanding the relationship between minor sulfur isotope signatures and chemical transformations with the aim of further refining connections between observed isotopic signals in organic and inorganic sulfur compounds and the chemical and physical processes that generate them, with a specific interest in further developing the 36S system.

Farquhar received an NSF CAREER Award in 2004 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.

Jérôme Chappellaz, CNRS, France

2013 Nicholas Shackleton Science Innovation Award medallist

Jérôme Chappellaz is Directeur de Recherche (senior scientist) at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He got trained at the University Joseph Fourier of Grenoble for a Master and then a PhD in Geophysics and Geochemistry. When recruited by CNRS in 1990, he became a specialist of past atmospheric composition changes over the industrial era and back to the late Quaternary, using diffusing firn air as well as air bubbles trapped in ice cores drilled in polar ice caps. Using these air archives, he and his team notably reconstructed the temporal evolution of atmospheric methane, one of the trace gases affecting the Earth radiative balance. He also used this tracer as a tool to evaluate the bipolar phasing of rapid climate changes (known as the Dansgaard/Oeschger events) characterizing the last glacial period, thus helping to constrain the dynamical processes at work in the climate system.

Pioneering isotope geochemistry on trace gases at his host laboratory (LGGE) in the mid-90s, he contributed to better understand the causes of past and recent changes of several key trace gases in the atmosphere, by reconstructing the temporal evolution of their stable isotopic ratios : methane of course, but also the other greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide, as well as carbon monoxide which is a key player in atmospheric chemistry. In addition to innovating in the laboratory for pioneering some ice core analyses, Jérôme Chappellaz participated to several field expeditions in Antarctica and in the Arctic, for collecting the precious ice core and firn air samples.

His work was recently recognized at the European level with the awarding of an European Research Council advanced grant, with the aim to notably develop new geochemical tools for probing polar ice sheets.

View Jérôme Chappellaz Award Acknowledgement, when receiving the EAG Science Innovation Award at Goldschmidt2013.