The International Standing Committee on Thermochronology awards three prizes for outstanding contributions to the global thermochronology community: the Dodson, Laslett, and Charles & Nancy Naeser Prizes.
The International Standing Committee on Thermochronology and the Awards Subcommittee are delighted to announce that the 2023 Prizes have been assigned and there will be a formal awards ceremony held during the meeting to honor the awardees.
2023 Laslett Prize to Rex Galbraith
The Laslett prize is awarded by the International Standing Committee on Thermochronology to a person deemed to have made an extraordinary contribution to the field of fission track thermochronology. The prize is named after, and was conceived to honor, Geoff Laslett a pioneer of quantitative fission track analysis and an outstanding scientist and statistician. The 2023 Laslett Prize is awarded to Rex Galbraith (University College London) in recognition of his enormous contributions to the development of statistical tools used by thermochronologists, including the radial plot, random effects models, and finite mixture models. His role in designing fission track inter-laboratory calibration studies and analysis of the results has provided a template for subsequent inter-laboratory calibration studies.
Handout summary of Galbraith's presentation
2023 Dodson Prize to Mark Harrison
The Dodson prize is awarded by the International Standing Committee on Thermochronology to a person for their extraordinary contribution to the field of thermochronology and/or to the international community of thermochronologists. The prize was conceived and named in honor of Martin Dodson, the pioneer of quantitative thermochronology. The recipient of the 2023 Dodson Prize is Mark Harrison (University of California at Los Angeles) in recognition of his pivotal role in developing the field of thermochronology. He has pioneered the use of the 40Ar/39Ar dating as a quantitative thermochronologic tool, determined the systematics and kinetics of diffusion for a number of different systems, and demonstrated the importance of thermochronology in studying a wide range of Earth Science problems.
2023 Charles and Nancy Naeser Prize to Sarah Falkowski and Kalin McDannell
The Charles and Nancy Naeser Prize is awarded by the International Standing Committee on Thermochronology to an early career scientist who has made an outstanding and/or innovative contribution in any area of the field of thermochronology. The award is named in honor of Charles and Nancy Naeser in recognition of their groundbreaking fundamental work in the field of thermochronology over many years. The joint recipients of the 2023 Charles and Nancy Naeser prize are Sarah Falkowski (University of Tübingen) and Kalin McDannell (Dartmouth College). The award recognizes Sarah for her use of multiple thermochronologic data sets to address first-order processes such as the role of climate and tectonic processes in orogenic systems. The award recognizes Kalin for his role in the development of the controlled ramped heating (CRH) method to investigate excess dispersion in apatite (U-Th)/He ages, and for his work investigating methods to extract better thermal history information from apatite fission-track data sets showing evidence of multi-kinetic behavior.
Awards
Award Descriptions
Martin Dodson Prize
This prize is awarded on behalf of the thermochronology community by the International Standing Committee on Thermochronology to a person who has made an extraordinary contribution, in any way, to the field of thermochronology and/or to the international community of thermochronologists. The prize was conceived and named in honor of Martin Dodson, the pioneer of quantitative thermochronology, who died at age 78 on 27 June 2010.
Geoff Laslett Prize
This prize is awarded by the international thermochronology community by the International Standing Committee on Thermochronology to a person who is deemed to have made an extraordinary contribution to the field of fission track thermochronology. The prize is named after, and was conceived to honor of Geoff Laslett, a pioneer of quantitative fission track analysis and an outstanding scientist and statistician, who died on 9th January 2010.
Charles & Nancy Naeser Prize
This prize is awarded on behalf of the thermochronology community by the International Standing Committee on Thermochronology to an early career scientist who has made an outstanding and/or innovative contribution in any area of the field of thermochronology. The award is named in honor of Charles and Nancy Naeser in recognition of their groundbreaking fundamental work in the field of thermochronology over many years. Eligibility requires the candidate to be actively engaged in the field and seven years or less out from their Ph.D. award (excluding periods of parental or unpaid leave during which the candidate was not working).
Previous Recipients
2020: Charles and Nancy Naeser Prize: William Guenthner2020: Dodson Prize: Richard Ketcham, Kerry Gallagher2020: Laslett Prize: Diane Seward, Barry Kohn2018 Dodson Prize: Andrew Carter2018 Laslett Prize: Günther Wagner2018 Charles and Nancy Naeser Prize: Alexis Ault, Marissa Tremblay2016 Dodson Prize: Peter Zeitler2016 Laslett Prize: Charles (Chuck) W. Naeser2014 Dodson Prize: Oscar Lovera2014 Laslett Prize: Andrew Gleadow2012 Dodson Prize: Martin DodsonNomination Procedure
The awards committee seeks nominations for each prize from community in general. This should be done to maximise reach using any appropriate advertising, email lists and social media etc. Requests for nominations will be accepted at any time, but a request for nominations should be announced and publicised widely in advance of each international meeting.
A nominations are normally submitted by an individual. A group of people who might wish to co-sign a joint nomination could also make a nomination. Any nomination must include a letter detailing the case for the nomination of the relevant prize. Nominations should be submitted directly to the awards sub-committee in confidence (via the chair). A nomination without a case for support cannot be fairly assessed and so will not be. An individual, or group, can only nominate one person for each award (so multiple single nominations for the same award will not be accepted, although joint awards may be considered if a case is warranted).
In past rounds some people asked to know who had already been nominated, so they might add their ‘vote’ to an existing nomination. We feel this is not feasible/desirable as it means confidentiality is breached and we wish to avoid “a general election” of an awardee. So we feel an AGU style approach, where nominations are received and reviewed in confidence and then kept in confidence by the awards committee, is appropriate. It is up to the individuals making nominations to decide whether they wish to inform the person they choose to nominate.
Awards sub-committee reviews and discusses all nominations and arrives at a final decision by consensus. Recipients of awards are then communicated to the organising committee of the forthcoming international meeting. If a difference of opinion between members of the awards sub-committee cannot be resolved (would be rare we hope, but could be for some reason) then this would be referred to the international standing committee for comment and input. If no consensus view is reached after this process, then a vote of all standing committee members decides the outcome (with chair of awards committee having a casting vote in case of deadlock).
Awards will normally be made every two years (to coincide with each international meeting). The awards sub-committee may choose to recommend no award if no suitable nominations are received.