F.G. Houtermans Award

About the F.G. Houtermans Award

The F.G. Houtermans award is bestowed annually by the EAG in recognition of exceptional contributions to geochemistry by an early career scientist. It is named in honor of Friedrich Georg Houtermans, a Dutch-Austrian-German physicist.

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

Award eligibility: candidates must have received a recognized doctorate within 7 years of the first day of the year in which the award is given. For the 2027 Houtermans Award, nominees must have received a PhD on/after 1 January 2020.
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 have received the Geochemical Society F.W. Clarke Award for the same body of work, or if they are a member of the EAG Council or of the Houtermans Award Committee.

View the F.G. Houtermans Award Committee Guidelines

Recipient of the 2026 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. Read more

The 2026 Houtermans Award will be presented at the Goldschmidt 2026 Conference in Montréal in July.

Former recipients of the Houtermans Award

2025 David V. Bekaert, Université de Lorraine, CNRS, CRPG, France. The 2025 Houtermans Award will be presented at the Goldschmidt 2026 Conference.
2024 Feifei Zhang, Nanjing University, China – Citation by Thomas Algeo and Acceptance and Award Lecture by Feifei Zhang
2023 Ming Tang, Peking University, China – Citation by William McDonough with Acceptance and Award Lecture by Ming Tang
2022 Raffaella Demichelis, Curtin University, Australia – Citation by Andrew Putnis and Acceptance by Raffaella Demichelis
2021 Paolo Sossi, ETH Zürich, Switzerland – Citation (video) by Hugh O’Neill and Frédéric Moynier and Acceptance (video) by Paolo Sossi
2020 Kun Wang, Washington University in St. Louis, USA – Citation by Frédéric Moynier and Acceptance by Kun Wang
2019 Stefan Lalonde, CNRS / Institut Universitaire Européen de la Mer, France – Citation by Kurt Konhauser
2018 Morgan Schaller, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
2017 Julie Prytulak, Imperial College London, UK
2016 Kate Hendry, University of Bristol, UK
2015 Caroline L. Peacock, University of Leeds, UK
2014 Liping Qin, University of Science and Technology of China
2013 James Day, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA
2012 Frédéric Moynier, Washington University in St. Louis, USA
2011 Maud Boyet, University of Clermont-Ferrand, France
2010 Karim Benzerara, University Pierre et Marie Curie, France
2009 Nathan Yee, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA
2008 Nicolas Dauphas, University of Chicago, USA
2007 Steve Parman, Brown University, USA
2006 James Badro, Institut de Physique du Globe, France
2005 Mark E. Hodson, University of York, UK
2004 Albert Galy, University of Cambridge, UK
2003 Jess F. Adkins, California Institute of Technology, USA
2000 Gleb Pokrovski, Geosciences Environnement Toulouse
1999 Eric Hauri, Carnegie Institute, USA
1998 Terry Plank, Columbia University, USA
1997 Ken Farley, Caltech, USA
1995 Marc Chaussidon, CNRS Nancy, France
1990 Michel Condomines, Geosciences Montpellier, France

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.

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.

David V. Bekaert, Université de Lorraine, CNRS, CRPG, France

2025 Houtermans Award medallist

David V. Bekaert is a Junior Professor at the University of Lorraine (UL) in France, where he leads the Environmental Geochemistry teaching unit at the École Nationale Supérieure de Géologie (ENSG) and conducts research at the Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques (CRPG). He earned his M.Sc. (2016) and Ph.D. (2020) at CRPG under the mentorship of Dr. Laurent Tissandier and Prof. Bernard Marty. After completing his doctoral studies, he spent two years at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts, USA, as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, collaborating with Dr. Peter Barry, Dr. Sune Nielsen, and Dr. Alan Seltzer. Upon returning to France, he joined Dr. Yves Marrocchi’s group as a postdoctoral researcher before being awarded a prestigious Junior Professor Chair at CRPG-UL (2022 to present). David is an isotope geochemist with a passion for mass spectrometry, analytical developments, and fieldwork, integrating newly generated data with experimental and numerical approaches to address fundamental questions, such as the origin of Earth's habitability. Throughout his early career, David has applied a range of isotopic tools (e.g., noble gases, water stable isotopes, δ¹⁵N, δ¹³C, δ⁵¹V, ¹⁰Be-¹⁰B) to explore fields including cosmochemistry, volcanology, mantle geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and climate science. At the core of his work is the use of noble gas isotopes to trace the origins and evolutionary pathways of volatile elements - such as carbon, nitrogen, and water - within terrestrial planets. To unravel the origins of terrestrial volatiles, David studies volcanic gas emissions, which provide direct insights into the deep Earth’s composition, where primordial volatiles acquired during planetary accretion have been progressively overprinted by surface-derived components introduced into the mantle via subduction. A central aspect of David’s work is the use of radioactive chronometers to establish temporal constraints on the degassing history of the solid Earth and the formation of the atmosphere. His research has contributed to a comprehensive understanding of the global cycle of terrestrial volatiles between Earth’s surface and interior, through processes like volcanism (degassing) and subduction (regassing). A significant milestone in his early career is the development of ultrahigh precision analysis of volcanic heavy noble gases using Dynamic Mass Spectrometry, made possible through a key collaboration with Dr. Seltzer (WHOI). This technique, which enables precision several orders of magnitude greater than conventional approaches, has only just begun to revolutionize our knowledge of mantle heavy noble gas compositions and their implications for the evolution of volatile elements across terrestrial reservoirs.

Feifei Zhang, Nanjing University, China

2024 Houtermans Award medallist

Feifei Zhang (张飞飞) is a full-time professor in isotope geochemistry and historical geobiology at Nanjing University. A Chinese raised in Xiaogan City, Hubei Province, Feifei completed his bachelor studies at the China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), his M.Sc. degree in Isotope Geochemistry at the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences under the guidance of Prof. Xiang-kun Zhu (2014), and his Ph.D. degree in Geological Sciences at the Arizona State University working with Prof. Ariel Anbar (2018). Feifei then spent two years at Yale University and the University of Copenhagen doing postdoctoral research with Profs. Noah Planavsky and Tais Dahl before returning to China.

Feifei’s research interests broadly lie in combining isotopic tracers with numerical models to study the complex interactions between Earth’s climatic and environmental systems and the evolution of life. He is studying paleoenvironmental change in carbonates by applying the Li, Ca, and Sr isotope systems to track continental weathering, the Ba and Zn isotope systems to track marine productivity, and the Fe, U, Ce, and Tl isotope systems to track marine redox. To do so, Feifei is running a cutting-edge metal geochemistry lab at Nanjing University equipped with a Neptune XT MC-ICP-MS, an Element XR HR-ICP-MS, an Agilent 8900 ICP-MS, an iCAP Pro ICP-OES, and a 120 square-meter clean laboratory.

Feifei’s major contribution in his early career has been to apply and test the carbonate U-isotope proxy to paleoceanic systems of multiple geologic epochs, demonstrating its robustness as a global-ocean redox indicator, which represents a seminal advance in paleoceanographic studies. Work in progress, funded by the National Science Foundation of China and in collaboration with Profs. Shu-zhong Shen (paleontologist), Yi-gang Xu (geochemist), and Alexandre Pohl and Benjamin Mills (modelers), is aimed at coupling geochemical proxy data with Earth-system models to understand how life and its planetary environments have co-evolved through the Paleozoic-Mesozoic transition in a quantitative manner.

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

Ming Tang, Peking University, China

2023 Houtermans Award medallist

Ming Tang is a geochemist at the School of Earth and Space Sciences, Peking University. Ming grew up in Zhenjiang, a small, quiet city with more than 3000 years of recorded history in eastern China. In 2007, he went to Nanjing University and got his bachelor’s degree four years later. After that, Ming departed for the U.S. and obtained his Ph.D. degree at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2016. For the next three years, Ming worked as a post-doc at Rice University. Ming finished his U.S. journey and returned to China to join Peking University in 2019.

Ming has been working on a variety of topics related to the evolution of continents. During his Ph.D., Ming was supervised by Bill McDonough and Roberta Rudnick and used the Eu anomaly in MORB and the continental crust to understand lower crust recycling. Roberta then introduced Ming to the field of Li isotopes. Ming collaborated with Catherine Chauvel and used Li isotopes to track sediment recycling in the Lesser Antilles. Ming later extended his interest in Li to zircon and collaborated with Maitrayee Bose, Dustin Trail, and Yulia Goreva. He showed that Li diffuses in multiple modes in zircon. Ming’s final project at Maryland was to use terrigenous sediments to track the chemical evolution of the upper continental crust through time. Ming was inspired by the diamictite work by Richard Gaschnig, Roberta’s former post-doc. Ming and Kang Chen built on Rich’s work and showed that Earth’s upper continental crust may have transitioned from mafic to felsic in the late Archean.

During his post-doc, Ming worked with Cin-Ty Lee at Rice University. There, Ming focused on arc lower crust, trying to understand what causes calc-alkaline magmatic differentiation. Ming showed that Fe depletion, which characterizes calc-alkaline magmas, was driven by the fractionations of Fe-rich silicates, particularly garnet, instead of magnetite, as previously thought. This series of works also showed that garnet fractionation causes endogenic oxidation of magmas.

The wide range of training projects gave Ming a research experience with rich flavors and encouraged him to think big. This wasn’t possible if Ming had not worked with many excellent scientists with diverse research backgrounds.

Ming’s enthusiasm for exploration continues. Now funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ming is working with his Chinese colleagues and international collaborators to understand how solid Earth processes influenced hypsometry through time and the consequences on the surface environment. Recently, Ming and his collaborators proposed that Earth may have experienced “orogenic quiescence” in its middle age. Ming also started to look at extraterrestrial materials, including the Lunar samples returned by the Chang’E-5 mission.

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

Raffaella Demichelis, Curtin University, Australia

2022 Houtermans Award medallist

Raffaella Demichelis is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow and holds a Senior Lecturer appointment at Curtin University, in Western Australia. She has led award-winning research into the structure and nucleation of biominerals. By providing definitive evidence in favour of a new non-classical nucleation theory, she changed the way we think about the nucleation and crystal growth of minerals. She opened new perspectives in the description of complex minerals, including minerals presenting multiple structures – a new concept that she independently developed – and mineral nanotubes with peculiar stability versus size/chirality profiles. She has co-authored software packages and developed tools, both independently and in collaboration, which model with high accuracy challenging systems (e.g. mineral nanotubes; ions in water). These tools are used worldwide in academia and industry, across the broad fields of chemistry, geochemistry and mineralogy.

Raffaella is originally from Italy, where she obtained a PhD in Chemical Sciences at the University of Torino in 2010. During her master thesis and PhD, she worked under the supervision of Prof Roberto Dovesi on modelling the structure and properties of aluminosilicates and carbon and inorganic nanotubes via first principle methods. This work also includes the development and implementation of tools for modelling vibrational spectra and materials with curled structures. Part of this work received the Ernesto Fea award for the best master thesis in mineralogy from the Faculty of Science.

Soon after she moved to Australia for a post-doctoral position

F.G. Houtermans Award

About the F.G. Houtermans Award

Recipient of the 2026 Houtermans Award: Alan M. Seltzer

University College Dublin, Ireland

Former recipients of the Houtermans Award

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

Career Paths

Alan M. Seltzer, University College Dublin, Ireland

2026 Houtermans Award medallist

David V. Bekaert, Université de Lorraine, CNRS, CRPG, France

2025 Houtermans Award medallist

Feifei Zhang, Nanjing University, China

2024 Houtermans Award medallist

Ming Tang, Peking University, China

2023 Houtermans Award medallist

Raffaella Demichelis, Curtin University, Australia

2022 Houtermans Award medallist

Recipient of the 2026 Houtermans Award:
Alan M. Seltzer