Congratulations to ESS Professors David Catling, Eric Steig, Baptiste Journaux, and Brendan Crowell, who are honored with four major AGU awards this year.
AGU will formally recognize this year’s recipients the Honors Reception at the 2023 annual meeting, which will convene more than 25,000 attendees from over 100 countries in San Francisco on 11-15 December 2023.
The UW College of the Environment will have a reception at AGU this year. Please check back later as we get closer.
For a list of previous awards to our faculty see our Awards and Honors page.
See also the announcements in UW News and the College of the Environment website.
AGU Fellow – David Catling
David Catling has been elected an AGU Fellow for contributions leading to a better understanding of the origin of life, planetary habitability, and how life and environments co-evolve. He is well-known for work on how the Earth’s atmosphere became oxygen-rich, which allowed complex life to evolve, as well as how Earth’s other atmospheric gases and climate changed over billions of years. He has also been involved in the exploration of Mars and research leading to improved knowledge of the chemistry of the Martian surface.
AGU Fellow – Eric Steig
Eric Steig is honored for his work on the cryosphere, particularly for his fundamental contributions to understanding climate variability in the polar regions, and how it affects the ice sheets. The network of ice-core records that Eric has developed in the 25 years has been used by dozens of other researchers as the key data set for understanding the last few centuries of climate and ice-sheet change in West Antarctica. Eric was also cited for his inclusive leadership of the ice-core research community, and his innovative contributions to public science communication.
Mineral and Rock Physics Early Career Award – Baptiste Journaux
Baptiste Journaux is one of very few people in the world who is both a high-pressure mineral physicist and a member of planetary science missions. He is at the forefront of efforts to understand water-rich worlds in and beyond our solar system. Journaux’s work with water at high pressure — he experimentally determined the ice VI and ice VII melting curves in the water-salt (NaCl) system under conditions that would be expected on icy worlds — has fundamental implications for the potential to find life on other planets and icy moons.
John Wahr Early Career Award – Brendan Crowell
Brendan Crowell’s research focuses on comprehensive modeling of natural disasters using geodesy and seismology, encompassing various spatial and temporal scales. Crowell pioneered techniques for incorporating GNSS (global navigation satellite system) into earthquake and tsunami early warning systems. His group is currently studying the use of GNSS signals-of-opportunity to enhance real-time understanding of natural disasters and developing a risk mitigation framework for coastal hazards such as tsunamis.