Janne Blichert-Toft,  Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon & CNRS, France

Recipient of the 2024 Urey Award

Janne Blichert-Toft is a Research Director with the CNRS at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENS Lyon, France). Following M.Sc. (1990) and Ph.D. (1993) degrees obtained at University of Copenhagen, with much time spent at Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University, she was awarded one of the first European Marie-Curie Post-Doctoral Fellowships to study at ENS Lyon. She was appointed by the CNRS at ENS Lyon in 1997, and defended her HDR dissertation at Université Claude Bernard, Lyon 1, in 2000. Over the years, she has been fortunate to spend extended periods of time as an invited professor at University of California Berkeley, Harvard University, California Institute of Technology, The Australian National University, Cambridge University, Tokyo University, University of Chicago, and Rice University. She was awarded Fellowship of the Geochemical Society and the European Association of Geochemistry in 2010, the American Geophysical Union in 2012, and the Mineralogical Society of America in 2023, and has been a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters since 2016. She is also the recipient of medals, prizes, and awards from the CNRS, the French Académie des Sciences, the French CEA, the French BRGM, the Danish Geological Society, the Geological Society of London, the European Geosciences Union, the American Geophysical Union, and the European Association of Geochemistry.

Janne is a geochemist and an analyst specializing in radiogenic and stable isotopes with applications to geochronology, terrestrial and planetary mantle-crust-core evolution and mantle dynamics, mantle geochemistry, crustal growth and lithospheric dynamics, early Earth geodynamics, planetology, cosmochemistry, meteoritics, and ore geology, with a thematic shift over the last 15 years into new arenas of anthropology, geoarcheology, archeology, archeometry, numismatics, and ancient history.

Janne is perhaps best known for advancing the measurement and application of the Lu-Hf isotope system by multiple-collector inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometry (MC-ICP-MS) in geochemistry, cosmochemistry, and planetary science. She showed the enormous power of this isotope system for constraining the origin, formation, and evolution of the Earth, the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and the early Solar System. Her work opened up new research trajectories that shaped the paths for geochemistry and cosmochemistry in the quest to reveal and quantify processes from the mineral to the planetary scale. She also used the revolutionizing new technique of MC-ICP-MS to reinvigorate Pb isotopes with high-precision measurements of a wide array of geological and archeological materials to address important questions, old and new, in the geochronology of the early Solar System and its solid planetary-type bodies, as well as terrestrial geodynamics, hominid evolution, oil formation, and archeological and historical issues so far only documented by ancient texts.

Janne had the privilege of being Editor of G-Cubed for ten years and, for the last decade has had the ongoing privilege of being Editor of Geochemical Perspectives and Associate Editor of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. She is also the Principal Editor for Geochemistry of Elements Magazine, another privilege and a different challenge.

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