Science Innovation Award | European Association of Geochemistry

Make a nomination for the 2021 Science Innovation Award

Nomination deadline is 15 November 2020

About the Science Innovation Award

The EAG Science Innovation Award recognizes scientists who have recently made a particularly important and innovative breakthrough in geochemistry. The geochemical research must be highly original and contribute in a significant fashion to our understanding of the natural behaviour of the Earth or planets. Such a contribution must be in the form of a widely recognized important piece of innovative scientific research published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The EAG Science Innovation Award is bestowed annually to a scientist within 30 years from the start of PhD, which must be completed. Eligibility is determined by the status of the candidate at the close of the year in which nominations are received and not the year the award is presented; hence, for the 2021 Science Innovation Award, candidates should have started their PhD in 1990 at the earliest.

The EAG Science Innovation Award subject area differs from year to year, according to the following five-year cycle:

2021 Alfred Edward “Ted” Ringwood Medal honoring his work in petrology and mineral physics

2022 Heinz Lowenstam Medal honoring his work in biogeochemistry

2023 Nicholas Shackleton Medal honoring his work in climatology

2024 Samuel Epstein Medal honoring his work in isotope geochemistry

2025 Werner Stumm Medal honoring his work in low temperature and surface geochemistry

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.

Recipient of the 2020 Science Innovation Award: Kevin Rosso

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA

Dr. Rosso’s genius has been to recognize the behavior and function of the electronic band structure, band bending, and the potential charge gradient buildup in semiconducting minerals. He uses these highly complex constructs to understand growth/dissolution, adsorption/desorption, aggregation/disaggregation, and catalytic activity that these critical minerals present with surrounding fluids and microorganisms. Key project include, but are not limited to (1) characterizing the kinetics and mechanisms of elementary charge and ion transport processes in redox transformation of semiconducting minerals, (2) predicting molecular-scale electron transfer kinetics in microbially-mediated reduction of bioavailable transition metals in subsurface environments, and (3) studying mechanisms of heterogeneous reduction of contaminant U(VI) and Tc(VII) by Fe(II)-bearing minerals. Read more

The 2020 EAG Science Innovation Award is named in honor of Werner Stumm for his work in low temperature and surface geochemistry.The 2020 Science Innovation Award medal lecture ‘Understanding Torque-Generating Forces Enabling Crystal Growth by Oriented Attachment’ was presented at the Goldschmidt 2020 Virtual Conference.

View the Citation by Benjamin Gilbert and Mike Hochella and Response by Kevin Rosso

Former recipients of the Science Innovation Award

2019 Ariel Anbar, Arizona State University, USA – Samuel Epstein Medal
Citation by Tim Lyons and response 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

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.