Ten professors and a staff scientist are being honored by the American Geophysical Society, which will present them with medals at a ceremony during the fall meeting in San Francisco in December. Carl Wunsch, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography in the Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences department at MIT, is being awarded the William Bowie Medal "for his wide-ranging research in the study of the ocean and its roles in shaping Earth's climate and its changes, and for unselfish cooperation in the field of physical oceanography."
E. Bruce Watson, Institute Professor of Science and professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, is receiving the Walter H. Bucher Medal "for fundamental contributions to understanding crustal processes through physical chemistry."
The Maurice Ewing Medal is going to G. Michael Purdy, director of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University, "for significant and original contributions to our understanding of oceanic crustal structure and as a developer of new geophysical instrumentation for use in the deep sea."
Subir K. Banerjee, I. T. Distinguished Professor and director of the Institute for Rock Magnetism at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, is receiving the John Adam Fleming Medal "for pioneering contributions to important applications of rock magnetic principles to terrestrial and extraterrestrial materials."
The Harry H. Hess Medal is being handed to Alexandra Navrotsky "for important contributions to our understanding of minerals and other materials through a wide range of theoretical and experimental applications of thermodynamics." She is the Edward Roessler chair in mathematical and physical sciences; distinguished professor of ceramic, Earth, and environmental-materials chemistry; and director of the Nanomaterials in the Environment, Agriculture, and Technology organized-research unit at the University of California, Davis.
Thomas Schmugge, the Gerald Thomas Professor of water resources at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, is being awarded the Robert E. Horton Medal "for contributions to improving both the theory and application of microwave and infrared radiative transfer to the remote sensing of the land surface, soil moisture, surface temperature, and emissivity."
The James B. Macelwane Medal is being awarded to Daniel J. Frost, Jerry Goldstein, and Jun Korenaga "for significant contributions to the geophysical sciences by a young scientist of outstanding ability." Frost is a research scientist at the Bavarian Research Institute of Experimental Geochemistry and Geophysics at the University of Bayreuth in Bayreuth, Germany. Goldstein is an adjoint assistant professor in the physics and astronomy department at the University of Texas and a principal scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, both in San Antonio. Korenaga is an assistant professor in the geology and geophysics department at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
John E. Kutzbach, associate director, emeritus professor of atmospheric oceanic sciences and environmental studies, and the Bascom- Plaenert Professor of Liberal Arts at the Center for Climatic Research in the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is receiving the Roger Revelle Medal "for his leadership in the science of climate change and its relation to the history of our Earth system."
The Charles A. Whitten Medal is going to John M. Wahr "for outstanding achievement in research" on Earth's dynamics and form. Wahr is a physics professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The society also recently announced the recipients of several 2006 awards, which will be distributed later this month at a ceremony in Baltimore.
Pembroke J. Hart is receiving the Edward A. Flinn III Award "for major contributions to the interrelated International Upper Mantle Project and its successor programs, the Geodynamics Project, and the Lithosphere Program; [for his work on] the international exchange of geophysical data through the World Data Center System; and for a lifetime of dedicated and exemplary staff support of advances in the geophysical sciences from the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958 to the 1990s." Hart is a retired staff officer at the National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council in Washington, DC.
Tom Siegfried, Texas-based freelance writer and former science editor of the Dallas Morning News, has been named the winner of the Robert C. Cowen Award for Sustained Achievement in Science Journalism. He is receiving the award for more than 20 years of "distinguished reporting and analysis of scientific discoveries, for creating and nurturing a model newspaper science department, and for training and encouraging a new generation of talented science writers."
The AGU's ocean sciences section award is being handed out to Worth D. Nowlin Jr, Distinguished Professor in the oceanography department at Texas A&M University, College Station. "The award is presented for outstanding and long-standing service to the ocean sciences," the citation says.
