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.