Awards | European Association of Geochemistry

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.

2023 Medallists

2023 H.C. Urey Award

Bo Barker Jørgensen

Aarhus University, Denmark

Bo Barker Jørgensen is a world-renowned microbial ecologist whose impact on biogeochemistry and geobiology has been revolutionary. Through novel methodologies and careful experiments and observations, Bo has revealed how microbes inhabiting marine waters and sediments both respond to and control their chemical environment. Thus, Bo has shown us how microbes shape the chemistry of the environment.
Read more

2023 Science Innovation Award

Rosalind Rickaby

University of Oxford, UK

Rosalind Rickaby is a world leader in developing novel proxies from marine carbonates to reconstruct climate and, more generally, Earth’s environment over geological time. Indeed, her research has informed us about the co-evolution of the geosphere and biosphere.
Read more

The 2023 EAG Science Innovation Award is named in honor of Nicholas Shackleton honoring his work in climatology.

2023 F.G. Houtermans Award

Ming Tang

Peking University, China

Ming Tang is recognized for forging new paths, thinking in new ways about old problems, and having a significant impact on our understanding of Earth, particularly the evolution of continental crust. He is also a kind-hearted and patient mentor who inspires those around him.
Read more

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. The subject area of this award differs every year, according to a 5 year cycle. The areas covered are: climatology, isotope geochemistry, low temperature and surface geochemistry, petrology and mineral physics, and biogeochemistry.

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.

Bo Barker Jørgensen, Aarhus University, Denmark

Recipient of the 2023 Urey Award

Bo Barker Jørgensen is a professor of Geomicrobiology at Aarhus University, Denmark. He was the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, and head of the Center for Geomicrobiology at Aarhus University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA.

Research Statement

My research focus is on the biogeochemistry and microbial ecology of marine sediments - from microscale to global perspectives. I use radiotracers combined with geochemical analyses to unravel processes of the sulfur and carbon cycles and determine their interactions and quantitative significance. Over the years, this approach has demonstrated the important contribution of sulfate reduction for the mineralization of sediment organic matter and for the anaerobic oxidation of methane. The approach has revealed the key role of sulfur disproportionation reactions and quantified the importance of sulfide oxidation for oxygen consumption in the seabed. The data have also revealed cryptic cycling of sulfur and methane.

Through the IODP, I have been deeply engaged in the exploration of the deep sub-seafloor biosphere. In the Center for Geomicrobiology, we studied this important component of the global biosphere and demonstrated how deeply buried microorganisms thrive under extreme energy limitation with generation times of up to thousand years. Their slow metabolism in million-year-old sediments control the balance between burial and mineralization of organic matter over geological time. By diverse DNA-sequencing techniques for phylogenetic and functional genes we have shown how these communities assemble already in near-surface sediments and become specialized only at depth. To conserve energy, they possess genes involved in the repair of critical macromolecules in the cells, for example to combat the racemization of amino acids.

The main objective of my current research remains to unravel the sulfur and methane cycles. We try to understand and reconcile the discrepancy between modeled and experimentally measured process rates and their use in global budgets. We study how the opposite processes of methane production and methane oxidation are controlled in the seabed, and which are the microorganisms responsible for cryptic methane cycling. We test the potential role of conductive minerals as capacitors by extracellular electron transfer in bacteria and archaea.

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

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.

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.