Class
| • | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | [X] |
Subdivision
| • | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | [X] |
| | 21 | Name: | Dr. Gordon J. MacDonald | | | Institution: | International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis | | | Year Elected: | 1963 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1929 | | | Death Date: | May 14, 2002 | | | | |
| 22 | Name: | Dr. Marcia K. McNutt | | | Institution: | National Academy of Sciences | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
Marcia K. McNutt received a B.A. in physics at Colorado College and a Ph.D. in Earth sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1978. She was a geophysicist for the Branch of Tectonophysics of the U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park from 1979-82. In 1982 she joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, serving as the associate director of the SeaGrant College Program from 1993-95. For the next two years she directed the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Joint Program in Oceanography. From 1997 to 2009 she directed the privately funded Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, serving as its president and chief executive officer. In 2009 President Obama nominated her to be the Director of the United States Geological Survey and her nomination was approved. She stepped down as Director of the USGS in February 2013 and returned to the west coast. In June 2013 she became Editor-in-Chief of "Science," the journals from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was elected President of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. In 2017 she was named the Desert Research Institute's Nevada Medalist.
Marcia McNutt is an active student of the Earth's physical properties. She relies for her field and modelling work principally on geophysical data, some of which she has collected herself in the course of more than 20 oceanographic cruises using equipment she helped to design. Her studies have led to more than 90 papers in international refereed journals on such topics as convection in Earth's mantle, continental break-up, and the uplift of the Tibetan plateau. Dr. McNutt is the recipient of the Macelwane Medal and the Maurice Ewing Medal of the American Geophysical Union, the MIT School of Science Graduate Teaching Prize, and the Sanctuary Reflections Award of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. She was elected president of the American Geophysical Union in 2000-2002. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2002. | |
| 23 | Name: | Dr. Jerry M. Melillo | | | Institution: | The Ecosystems Center, Marine Biological Laboratory | | | Year Elected: | 2005 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
Jerry Melillo is an ecologist/biogeochemist and was the Co-Director of The Ecosystem Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He is an alumnus of Wesleyan (BA, MAT) and Yale (MFS, Ph.D.). Dr. Melillo has been at the MBL for 30 years and has become a prominent figure in science policy, recognized internationally for his research on global warming and climate change. He is interested in how human activities are altering the biology and chemistry of terrestrial ecosystems. His studies take him around the world, from the tropics of Brazil to the Swedish sub-Arctic. Melillo studies carbon and nitrogen cycling in terrestrial ecosystems by using a combination of large field experiments and computer simulation models. Both are critical to understanding how climate change might affect our world in the future. Together with his colleagues, Melillo is presently conducting a soil-warming experiment at the Harvard Forest in western Massachusetts and a carbon dioxide enrichment and plant and soil warming experiment at the Abisko Research Station in northern Sweden to study the effects of global warming on soil carbon and nitrogen dynamics, plant growth, and potential feedbacks to the climate system. In addition to field research, Melillo uses computer simulation models to help answer the many "what if" questions related to the effects of future climate change. The models not only synthesize and integrate a lot of information, but they help give rise to new field experiments. Melillo and his colleagues are using the results of their field experiments and their computer simulation models to explore the consequences of a range of stresses, such as climate change, ozone pollution and acid rain, on the forests of New England. How will forest growth be affected? Might some tree species do better than others, such that the composition of our forests will change? Will the quality of water draining from the affected forests be diminished? Melillo and other Ecosystem Center scientists are collaborating with Chinese researchers to explore similar questions about the forests of China. Working with Brazilian scientists, Melillo and other Center scientists are studying how the clearing of rainforests of the Amazon Basin for pastures and soybean fields affects the rate at which climate-changing greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide are emitted to the atmosphere. They are also studying the links between land-cover and land-use changes, stream water quality, and biodiversity in the streams. For the last 10 years, Melillo and Ecosystems Center staff have collaborated with economists, atmospheric chemists and physicists, and ocean scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to build a large model that couples the land, oceans, and atmosphere with a projected set of economic futures. Melillo's group focuses on the terrestrial portion of the model. In the late 1990s, he temporarily left the MBL to serve in Washington as the Associate Director for Environment in President Clinton's Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he directed programs on environmental monitoring of ecosystem health and advised the administration on natural resource and pollution issues. Science education has long been of interest to Melillo. In 1997, he founded the Semester in Environmental Science (SES) at the Marine Biological Laboratory. SES is a 15-week program in environmental science offered each fall to students enrolled in colleges participating in the MBL Consortium in Environmental Science. Recently, Melillo headed an MBL team to develop a new Brown University-MBL Graduate Program in Biological and Environmental Studies. The first group of graduate students entered the program in the fall of 2004. As part of this Brown/MBL partnership, Melillo was appointed to the Brown faculty as a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Melillo is currently President of the Ecological Society of America, and Past-President of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, an international organization that conducts assessments of emerging environmental issues. He lives in Falmouth, Massachusetts with his wife, Lalise, who teaches history and rhetoric at Falmouth Academy, a local private school. They have one son, Ted Melillo, who is a graduate of Swarthmore College and is now finishing his Ph.D. in environmental history at Yale. | |
| 24 | Name: | Dr. Ellen Mosley-Thompson | | | Institution: | Ohio State University | | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | | | |
Ellen Mosley-Thompson is a Distinguished University Professor, Senior Research Scientist in the Byrd Polar Research Center at the Ohio State University. She was Director of the Byrd Polar Research Center from 2009-2016. Dr. Mosley-Thompson holds a B.S. degree in physics and a Master’s and Ph.D. in climatology and atmospheric sciences. She uses the chemical and physical properties preserved in ice cores collected from the polar ice sheets and high mountain glaciers to reconstruct the Earth’s complex climate history. These records indicate that the Earth’s climate has moved outside the range of natural variability experienced over at least the last 2000 years. Dr. Mosley-Thompson has led a total fourteen expeditions to drill ice cores at remote locations in Antarctica and Greenland. She established Antarctica’s most extensive and longest running snow accumulation network at South Pole Station. In addition to her election as a member of the American Philosophical Society (2009) Dr. Mosley-Thompson is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2009). She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has received the Dan David Prize (2008), the Roy Chapman Andrews Society 2007 Distinguished Explorer Award, The Common Wealth Award for Science and Invention (2002), and the Franklin Institute's Franklin Medal (2012).
Weblink 1: http://www.geography.osu.edu/faculty/emt/
Weblink 2: http://bprc.osu.edu/Icecore/GroupP.html#ellenmosleythompson | |
| 25 | Name: | Dr. Walter H. Munk | | | Institution: | Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego | | | Year Elected: | 1965 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1917 | | | Death Date: | February 8, 2019 | | | | | | |
Walter H. Munk was a brilliant scholar and scientist who was considered one of the greatest oceanographers of his time. His principal interests included global acoustics, greenhouse warming, tides and the air-sea boundary. Dr. Munk received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. for work at the Scripps Institution, which he has been affiliated with throughout his career. During World War II, Dr. Munk and Harald Sverdrup, then the director of Scripps, developed a system for forecasting breakers and surf on beaches, a technique of crucial importance in military amphibious landings. During the 1946 testing of nuclear weapons at Bikini Atoll in the southern Pacific Ocean, Dr. Munk participated in analysis of the currents and diffusion in the lagoon and the water exchange with the open seas. In 1963, he led a study of attenuation in ocean swells generated in Antarctica, measuring fluctuations with pressure sensing devices lowered to the ocean floor. Measurements also were made at six Pacific Ocean locations and from FLIP, the Floating Instrument Platform, developed at Scripps. In 1969 he began measuring tides in the deep sea, using highly sophisticated pressure-sensing instruments that were dropped to the ocean floor and retrieved by acoustic release. Dr. Munk also played a leading role in developing new methods for tracking long-term changes in climate associated with global warming as part of the Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate (ATOC) project. The idea behind ATOC is to send sound signals from underwater speakers and track how long it takes them to reach receivers moored to the floor of the Pacific thousands of miles away. Because sound travels faster in warmer water than cooler water, a long-term series of tests that recorded increasingly faster travel times indicates that the ocean is warming. Dr. Munk received numerous honors for his work, including membership in the National Academy of Sciences (1956) and the Royal Society of London (1976). He was a Guggenheim Fellow three times and was awarded the Arthur L. Day Medal, the Sverdrup Gold Medal and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society of London, among other honors. In 1999 he received the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences for his fundamental contributions to the field of oceanography and in 2010 he was awarded the Crafoord prize. At the end of his career he was Research Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Walter H. Munk died on February 8, 2019 in the La Jolla section of San Diego at the age of 101. | |
| 26 | Name: | Dr. Alexandra Navrotsky | | | Institution: | Arizona State University | | | Year Elected: | 2011 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
Alexandra Navrotsky was educated at the Bronx High School of Science and the University of Chicago (B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in physical chemistry). After postdoctoral work in Germany and at Penn State University, she joined the faculty in Chemistry at Arizona State University, where she remained till her move to the Department of Geological and Geophysical Sciences at Princeton University in 1985. She chaired that department from 1988 to 1991 and has been active in the Princeton Materials Institute. In 1997, she became an Interdisciplinary Professor of Ceramic, Earth, and Environmental Materials Chemistry at the University of California at Davis and was appointed Edward Roessler Chair in Mathematical and Physical Sciences in 2001. She was appointed interim dean of the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences in 2013 while UC Davis searched for a successor to the former dean. In 2019 she returned to Arizona State to head the newly created Navrotsky Eyring Center for Materials of the Universe.
Her research interests have centered about relating microscopic features of structure and bonding to macroscopic thermodynamic behavior in minerals, ceramics, and other complex materials. She has made contributions to mineral thermodynamics; mantle mineralogy and high pressure phase transitions; silicate melt and glass thermodynamics; order-disorder in spinels; framework silicates; and other oxides; ceramic processing; oxide superconductors; nanophase oxides, zeolites, nitrides, perovskites; and the general problem of structure-energy-property systematics. The main technical area of her laboratory is high temperature reaction calorimetry. She is director of the UC Davis Organized Research Unit on Nanomaterials in the Environment, Agriculture and Technology (NEAT-ORU). She has published over 1,300 scientific papers.
Honors include an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (1973); Mineralogical Society of America Award (1981); American Geophysical Union Fellow (1988); Vice-President, Mineralogical Society of America (1991-1992), President (1992-1993); Geochemical Society Fellow (1997). She spent five years (1986-1991) as Editor, Physics and Chemistry of Minerals, and serves on numerous advisory committees and panels in both government and academe. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1993. In 1995 she received the Ross Coffin Purdy Award from the American Ceramic Society and was awarded the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa from Uppsala University, Sweden. In 2002 she was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth Science. In 2004, she was elected a Fellow of The Mineralogical Society (Great Britain) and awarded the Urey Medal (the highest career honor of the European Association of Geochemistry). In 2005, she was bestowed with the Spriggs Phase Equilibria Award of the American Ceramic Society. In 2006, she received the Harry H. Hess Medal of the American Geophysical Union. In October 2009, she received the Roebling Medal, the highest honor of the Mineralogical Society of America. In 2016 she was awarded the Goldschmidt Award. | |
| 27 | Name: | Dr. Thomas B. Nolan | | | Institution: | U. S. Geological Survey | | | Year Elected: | 1957 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1901 | | | Death Date: | 8/2/92 | | | | |
| 28 | Name: | Dr. John A. Orcutt | | | Institution: | Center for Earth Observations and Applications, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
John A. Orcutt received a B.S. at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1966, graduating 3rd in Class. He went to the University of Liverpool as a Fulbright Scholar and received an M.Sc. in 1968. He was the chief engineer of the nuclear submarine USS Kamehameha for the U.S. Navy, 1967-73. In 1976 he earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego, and joined the faculty at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography as an assistant research geophysicist in 1977. Subsequently he became professor of geophysics and the director of the Cecil and Ida Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. He was the director of the UCSD Center for Earth Observations & Applications and deputy director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and is currently Professor of Geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Distinguished Researcher at the San Diego Supercomputer. John Orcutt has made major contributions in marine geophysics and particularly the elucidation of the volcanic mid-ocean ridges. He was the first to discover an active magma body beneath these ridges and his work led to the initiation of a major, continuing research program called RIDGE. He has taught an exceptional number of students in geophysics, and they have now assumed important leadership roles in the study of the oceans and the continents. He has played an important role monitoring the Earth for nuclear tests and is currently leading a new program to establish a permanent presence in the oceans for detecting changes in Earth systems. Dr. Orcutt has served as president of the American Geophysical Union and has received numerous awards, including the Newcomb-Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1980) and the Maurice Ewing Medal from the American Geophysical Union and U.S. Navy (1994). He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2002 and a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2011. | |
| 29 | Name: | Ms. Julie Packard | | | Institution: | Monterey Bay Aquarium | | | Year Elected: | 2004 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1953 | | | | | | |
Through her leadership of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, support of projects via the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and service of the Pew Oceans Commission, Julie Packard has become an icon for understanding and protecting the Earth\'s environment. She helped found the Monterey Bay Aquarium twenty years ago, providing strong leadership ans the first and only executive director of an institution whose mission is to promote and inspire ocean conservation. With teh Monterey Bay Aquarium success, in 1987 the Packard family founded the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, dedicated to the advancement of ocean sciences. Julie Packard has served as a member of its board since its inception and as chair since 1996. A trustee of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation for 25 years, she has helped share the foundation\'s philanthropic programs to support conservation and science. Born in California, Ms. Packard hold an M.A. from University of California, Santa Cruz (1978). She was awarded the Audubon Medal for Conservation in 1998. | |
| 30 | Name: | Dr. Claire L. Parkinson | | | Institution: | NASA Goddard Space Flight Center | | | Year Elected: | 2010 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | | | |
Claire Parkinson is a climatologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with a research emphasis since the late 1970s on polar sea ice and climate change. She is also keenly interested in the history and philosophy of science. Parkinson developed one of the earliest computer models of sea ice and has done field work in both the Arctic and Antarctic. However, her research centers mostly on satellite data analysis, which she has used (with others) to establish many details of the long-term trends and interannual variabilities in the Earth’s sea ice covers, including a substantial decrease in Arctic sea ice and a lesser increase in Antarctic sea ice since the late 1970s. Since 1993, Dr. Parkinson has additionally been Project Scientist for NASA’s Aqua satellite, which launched in May 2002 and is transmitting data on many atmospheric, ocean, land, and ice variables. She has written books on the history of science (Breakthroughs: A Chronology of Great Achievements in Science and Mathematics), satellite observations (Earth from Above: Using Color-Coded Satellite Images to Examine the Global Environment), and climate change (Coming Climate Crisis? Consider the Past, Beware the Big Fix). She also coauthored with Warren Washington a textbook on climate modeling, coauthored atlases of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, and co-edited two books on satellite observations related to global change. Parkinson has received a NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal for her work as the Aqua Project Scientist, a NASA Exceptional Service Medal for her work on educational outreach, and the Goldthwait Polar Medal from the Byrd Polar Research Center for her sea ice research. She was awarded the 2020 Roger Revelle Medal. She is a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and Phi Beta Kappa and is on the Council and Committee on Council Affairs of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2009 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2010. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018. Her B.A. degree is from Wellesley College, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees are from Ohio State University. She frequently speaks to teachers, students, and the general public, on topics including global ice coverage, climate change, the Aqua satellite mission, and the value of satellite observations. | |
| 31 | Name: | Dr. Kimberly A. Prather | | | Institution: | Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego | | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1962 | | | | | | |
Kimberly A. Prather is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and the Distinguished Chair in Atmospheric Chemistry at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She is also Founding Director of the NSF Center for Aerosol Impacts on Chemistry of the Environment. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 1990. Prior to her arrival at the Scripps Institute, she taught at the University of California, Riverside from 1992 to 2001 and worked as a Research Associate at the Statewide Air Pollution Research Center from 1994 to 2001.
Prather has worked on aerosols throughout her professional career. She devised an aerosol time-of-flight mass spectrometer with high temporal and size resolutions, using it to study health effects of ultrafine particles to precisely measure their size and composition, as well as to measure exhaust particles from heavy-duty gasoline/diesel vehicles. She discovered that aerosols traveled well into the stratosphere where they froze and later returned to Earth; this research became critical in studying atmospheric environments' impact on the COVID-19 pandemic. While WHO and CDC first proposed that the virus was passed from person to person by contact with surfaces, it is actually spread via stable aerosols--not by surface contacts or droplets settling on these surfaces. Recently, at a National Academy of Sciences symposium, Anthony Fauci, Prather, and others discussed aerosols' role in the spread of COVID-19 and the importance of minimizing contamination using good ventilation, HEPA filters, and masking especially at newly-opened schools and offices.
Prather received the American Society for Mass Spectrometry Award, the National Science Foundation Special Creativity and Young Investigators Awards, the Smoluchowski Award, the Kenneth T. Whitby Award, The Arthur F. Findeis Award, the UCSD Faculty Sustainability Award, the American Chemical Society's Distinguished Scientist Award, the Haagen-Smit Clean Air Award, the Chancellor's Associates Excellence Award in Research in Science and Engineering, and the 2024 NAS Award in Chemical Sciences. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 2010, the National Academy of Engineering since 2019, and the National Academy of Sciences since 2020. Prather was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2022. | |
| 32 | Name: | Dr. Frank Press | | | Institution: | National Academy of Sciences | | | Year Elected: | 1973 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1924 | | | Death Date: | January 29, 2020 | | | | | | |
Frank Press was President of the National Academy of Sciences, Chairman of the National Research Council from 1981-93, Science Advisor to the President of the United States and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, from 1977-81. Prior to that, he was professor of geophysics at MIT and Chairman of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Dr. Press was also professor of geophysics at the California Institute of Technology and director of its Seismological Laboratory. He is a Life Member of the Corporation of MIT and Board Member of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Marine Biological Laboratory, and the Monterey Bay Research Institute. He is also a director of a medical diagnostic device company.
Dr. Press earned a B.S. from the City College of New York, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Royal Astronomical Society, the Royal Society, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of thirty honorary degrees. Among his awards are the National Medal of Science, the Vannevar Bush Award, and the Pupin Medal from Columbia University. Dr. Press received the Japan Prize from the Emperor in 1993 and was awarded the Lomonosov Medal, the highest award of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dr. Press was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1973. He died January 29, 2020 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina at the age of 95. | |
| 33 | Name: | Dr. V. Ramanathan | | | Institution: | Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1944 | | | | | | |
V. (Ram) Ramanathan is the Victor C. Alderson Professor of Applied Ocean Sciences & Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), University of California, San Diego, where he also directs the Center for Atmospheric Sciences. He is the Chairman of the UNEP sponsored Atmospheric Brown Cloud Project and was the co-chief scientist for the Indian Ocean Experiment (INDOEX), which led to the discovery of the South Asian brown haze. Dr. Ramanathan has made fundamental contributions to our modern understanding of global climate change and human impacts on climate and environment. He is widely recognized for establishing the impacts of non-CO2 trace gases in climate, particularly the contributions of chlorofluorocarbons as well as tropospheric and stratospheric ozone and for his research in understanding the effects of water vapor, clouds and aerosols in global climate change. More recently he demonstrated that soot can play an unexpectedly large role in global dimming. His work on the trace gas greenhouse effect linked chemistry in a fundamental way to climate, while his work on the radiative effects of tropospheric ozone and soot linked air pollution strongly with global warming. He was the first to demonstrate in 1975 that CFCs are major greenhouse gases and that adding one molecule of CFC to the atmosphere has the same greenhouse effect of adding more than 10,000 molecules of CO2. He then led a WMO study which concluded that numerous trace gases are significant contributors to global warming. He followed this up by predicting (with Madden) in 1980 that the global warming would be detectable by 2000, which was subsequently verified in 2001. He led innovative efforts to distinguish the effects of infrared absorption and reflection both by clouds and clear skies using global satellite data, and thereby provided new observational constraints on the influence of clouds in the Earth's energy budget. He also used the satellite data to show that water vapor greenhouse effect was a major amplifier of global warming. With Pitcher, et al., he played a key role in developing the first community climate model, now the major American climate simulation research model. During the 1990s, he designed and conducted two international field experiments, the Central Equatorial Pacific experiment with J. Kuettner and the Indian Ocean experiment with P. J. Crutzen. With INDOEX scientists from the U.S., Europe and India, he showed that black carbon and other aerosols in the widespread South Asian brown haze led to a large reduction of solar radiation reaching the surface (dimming) and increased solar heating of atmosphere with significant impacts on regional climate and monsoon rainfall. He is now studying the effects of Atmospheric Brown Clouds over Asia, including their effects on water and regional climate. For this purpose he is developing an observing system with light weight and long range unmanned aircraft vehicles with miniaturized instruments. He has received numerous honors including: the Buys Ballot Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences given once every decade; the VOLVO environmental prize for pioneering work related to the greenhouse effect; the Rossby Medal which is the highest award given by the American Meteorological Society; induction into the National Academy of Sciences in April 2003; election by Pope John Paul II to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2004; the 2018 Mendel Medal from Villanova University; and the 2021 Blue Planet Prize of Japan's Asahi Glass Foundation. He has served on numerous national and international committees and has given expert testimonies in the U.S. Congress. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2006. | |
| 34 | Name: | Dr. Marilyn Raphael | | | Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles; National Center for Atmospheric Research | | | Year Elected: | 2023 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1959 | | | | |
| 35 | Name: | Dr. Roger Revelle | | | Institution: | University of California, San Diego | | | Year Elected: | 1960 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1909 | | | Death Date: | 7/15/91 | | | | |
| 36 | Name: | Dr. John Rodgers | | | Institution: | Yale University | | | Year Elected: | 1986 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1914 | | | Death Date: | March 7, 2004 | | | | |
| 37 | Name: | Dr. Susan Solomon | | | Institution: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology | | | Year Elected: | 2008 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1956 | | | | | | |
Susan Solomon is widely recognized as one of the leaders in the field of atmospheric science. After receiving her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981, she was employed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as a research scientist. She retired in 2011 after 30 years with NOAA. In 2012 she joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she serves as the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Atomospheric Chemistry & Climate Science in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.
Her scientific papers have provided not only key measurements but also theoretical understanding regarding ozone destruction, especially the role of surface chemistry. In 1986 and 1987 she served as the head project scientist of the National Ozone Expedition at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, and made some of the first measurements there that pointed towards chlorofluorocarbons as the cause of the ozone hole. In 1994, an Antarctic glacier was named in her honor in recognition of that work. In March of 2000 she received the National Medal of Science, the United States' highest scientific honor, for "key insights in explaining the cause of the Antarctic ozone hole." She is the recipient of many other honors and awards, including the highest awards of the American Geophysical Union (the Bowie Medal), the American Meteorological Society (the Rossby Medal), and the Geochemical Society (the Goldschmidt Medal). She is also the recipient of the Commonwealth Prize and the Lemaitre Prize, as well as the ozone award and Vienna Convention Award from the United Nations Environment Programme. In 1992 R&D magazine honored her as its scientist of the year. In 2004 she received the prestigious Blue Planet Prize for "pioneering research identifying the causative mechanisms producing the Antarctic ozone hole." In January 2017 she was awarded the National Academy of Sciences' Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship. She is a recipient of numerous honorary doctoral degrees from universities in the U.S. and abroad. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a foreign associate of the French Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the European Academy of Sciences. Her current research includes climate change and ozone depletion. She served as co-chair of the Working Group 1 Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007), providing scientific information to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. IPCC and Albert Gore, Jr. jointly received the Nobel Prize on 2007. She was named one of the year's 100 most influential people in Time magazine in 2008. She also received the Grande Medaille of the Academy of Sciences in Paris for her leadership in ozone and climate science in 2008. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008. | |
| 38 | Name: | Dr. Athelstan F. Spilhaus | | | Institution: | Pan Geo, Inc. | | | Year Elected: | 1968 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1911 | | | Death Date: | 3/30/98 | | | | |
| 39 | Name: | Dr. Lonnie G. Thompson | | | Institution: | Ohio State University | | | Year Elected: | 2006 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | | | |
Lonnie G. Thompson is one of the world's foremost authorities on paleo-climatology and glaciology. He has led more than 50 expeditions during the last 30 years, conducting ice-core drilling programs in the world's polar regions as well as in tropical and subtropical ice fields. Recently, Dr. Thompson and his team developed lightweight solar-powered drilling equipment for the acquisition of histories from ice fields in the high Andes of Peru and on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The results of these histories, published in more that 180 articles, have contributed greatly toward the understanding of the Earth's past, present and future climate system. Other Thompson-led expeditions have recovered a 460-meter-long ice core, the world's longest from a mountain range (Alaska, 2002); the first tropic ice core (Peru, 1983); and cores containing the entire sequence of the Last Glacial Stage as well as cores dating over 750,000 years in age, the oldest outside the polar regions (Tibet, 1992).
Dr. Thompson's research has resulted in major revisions in the field of paleoclimatology, in particular, by demonstrating how tropical regions have undergone significant climate variability, countering an earlier view that higher latitudes dominate climate change. Dr. Thompson has received numerous honors and awards. In 2005, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and was awarded the John and Alice Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. In 2019 he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been selected by Time magazine and CNN as one of "America's Best" in science and medicine. His research has been featured in hundreds of publications, including National Geographic and the National Geographic Adventure magazines. He and his team are the subject of a new book entitled: Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World's Highest Mountains by Mark Bowen published in late 2005. In 2006, he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society and was also chosen to receive the Roy Chapman Andrews Society 2007 Distinguished Explorer Award. He has received the nation's highest honor in science, the 2005 National Medal of Science, and the 2012 Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute. Lonnie Thompson was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2006. | |
| 40 | Name: | Dr. Billie Lee Turner | | | Institution: | Arizona State University | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 105. Physical Earth Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | | | | |
Billie Lee Turner II is a geographer engaged in human-environmental science, addressing problems situated at the intersection of society and the biophysical world. These problems range from prehistory to contemporary sustainability, exemplified in three broad research topics. [1] Turner helped to establish how the ancient Maya peoples transformed their homelands, including a range of intensive agricultural practices, to sustain a large and affluent population for millennia. Ultimately, the scale of landscape changes amplified extensive drought and, combined with a diminution of economic conditions, likely contributed to the collapse of Maya city-states and the long-time depopulation of the Maya heartlands. [2] Through fieldwork with his students across the tropics, Turner helped to enlarge and apply the concept of induced intensification to understand changes among subsistence and semi-subsistence farmers, foremost in the tropical world. Building from theoretical constructs of E. Boserup, he added an environmental component that amplifies or attenuates the relationship between demands on households and the intensity of cultivation that follows. [3] Turner assisted in the development of land system science, addressing land-use and-cover change as a human-environmental system. His interdisciplinary research teams demonstrated how remote sensing, economics, ecology, climate, and spatial analysis can be fused to model the drivers of land change and to address the vulnerability of these changes on the two subsystems in question.
The outlets for this research range across multiple research communities, from archaeology, history, anthropology and geography to paleo-history, ecology, and sustainability. They include interdisciplinary journals as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ambio, and Nature Sustainability, as well as such book/edited book offerings as The Earth as Transformed by Human Action (Cambridge Press 1990) and Cultivated Landscapes of Middle American on the Eve of Conquest (Oxford Press, 2001).
Turner has participated in a large range of national and international research panels and committees charged with developing and leading research activities. Examples include: Chair, Core Project Planning Committee of Global Land-Use/Cover Change of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and the International Human Dimensions Programme (IGBP & IHDP); Scientific Steering, Land-use/Cover Change, IGBP & IHDP; Synthesis Committee, IGBP; Scientific Steering Committee, Global Land Project, IGBP & IHDP; Committee for Research on Global Change, Social Science Research Council; Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, National Research Council (NRC); Committee on Grand Challenges in Environmental Science, NRC; Board on Earth Sciences and Resources, NRC; Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability, National Academy of Sciences (NAS); Steering Committee, Ecosystem Services, NAS; Science Committee, DIVERSITAS.
Turner received BA and MA degrees in geography in 1968 and 1969, respectively, from the University of Texas at Austin. After two years of military service, he completed his Ph.D. in geography in 1974 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was an Assistant Professor of Geography, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1975-76, and Research Associate (1976) and Assistant Professor of Geography, University of Oklahoma (1977-1980). With a move to the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, he served as: Assistant Professor 1980-81, Associate Professor 1981-85, and Full Professor 1985-2008; Milton P. & Alice C. Higgins Professor of Environment and Society, 1995-2008; Director, Graduate School of Geography, 1983-88, 1997-98, and 2004-08, Director of the George Perkins Marsh Institute, 1994-97; and Distinguished Research Professor, 2008-pr. In 2008 Turner moved to Arizona State University, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning & School of Sustainability as the Gilbert F. White Professor of Environment and Society, with subsequent appointments as a Distinguished Sustainability Scientist, 2011, and Regents’ Professor, 2016. In addition, he is Adjunct Faculty of Graduate Studies, School of Resource and Environment, Dalhousie University.
Turner’s research contributions have received multiple awards and honors from different disciplines, foundations, and organizations, including: Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1981-82); Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1994-95); Distinguished Research Honors, American Association of Geographers (1995); Centenary Medal, Royal Scottish Geographical Society (1996), Sustainability Science Award, Ecological Society of America (2002), and Outstanding Alumnus Award, University of Texas (2018). He is a member of National Academy of Sciences (1995) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998), and a Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (2002), Massachusetts Academy of Sciences (2008), and Fellow, American Association of Geographers (2020). | |
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