Call for nominations for the 2016 Dodson and Laslett Prizes
Dear Colleagues,
This call is for nominations for the Dodson Prize and the Laslett Prize for 2016. The prizes will be awarded at the 15th International Conference on Thermochronology -Thermo2016 meeting to be held in Mariseas, Brazil, Maresias 18-23 September 2016. Please see the accompanying information regarding the background of the two prizes and details of the evaluation process. Nominations must be supported by a case for support and submitted to the chair of the awards committee, Roderick Brown ([log in to unmask]) by 26th August 2016.
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 honour of Martin Dodson the pioneer of quantitative thermochronology, who died at age 78 on 27 June 2010.
Laslett Prize
This prize is awarded by the international thermochronology community 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 honour, Geoff Laslett a pioneer of quantitative fission track analysis and an outstanding scientist and statistician, who died on 9th January 2010.
Awards committee
Roderick Brown (chair), Cornelia Spiegel, Cécile Gautheron, Peter Reiners, Paul Fitzgerald
Proposal for awards process for Dodson and Laslett prizes (see Appendix 1)
Current awards sub-committee members are;
Roderick Brown (chair), Cécile Gautheron, Cornelia Spiegel, Peter Reiners, Paul Fitzgerald
Composition and formation awards sub-committee
Awards sub-committee comprising six members with one chair are nominated and approved (by vote if required) by the international standing committee. Membership is reviewed and confirmed every 2 years (i.e. at each international meeting) and rotated on a three meeting cycle (i.e. members serve maximum of 6 years).
Process of nominations for awards
1. 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.
2. 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).
3. 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.
Review of nominations
4. 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).
5. 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.
Previous recipients:
2012 Dodson Prize; Martin Dodson
2014 Dodson Prize; Oscar Lovera
2014 Laslett Prize; Andrew Gleadow
Appendix 1
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 honour of Martin Dodson (Appendix 2), the pioneer of quantitative thermochronology, who died at age 78 on 27 June 2010.
Cliff, B., and M. Wilson (2010), Martin Dodson (1932–2010), Eos Trans. AGU, 91(45), 418–419, doi:10.1029/2010EO450002.
Laslett Prize
This prize is awarded by the international thermochronology community 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 honour, Geoff Laslett (Appendix 2), a pioneer of quantitative fission track analysis and an outstanding scientist and statistician, who died on 9th January 2010.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/his-numbers-opened-up-the-past-20100314-q63o.html
Appendix 2
Martin Dodson 1932-2010
Dr Martin Dodson, one of the pioneers in the quantitative measurement of the ages of rocks by isotopic methods in the 20th Century, died on 27th June 2010.
Born in 1932 and a pupil at Bootham School, York, from 1947-1950, Martin went up to St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1950 to read for the Natural Sciences Tripos. His main subject was physics but, significantly for his future career, his degree programme also included geology as a subsidiary. Following a period of research at Cambridge after graduation, Martin joined the UK Atomic Energy Authority as a Scientific Officer in 1956, working on the diffusion and flow of gases in porous solids. However, he soon returned to the academic fold, becoming a Research Fellow in the Department of Geology and Mineralogy at Oxford University in 1958, where he was a member of the geochronology group. Geochronology, the science of determining the age of rocks and minerals, was still in its comparative infancy as a discipline and Martin was to be one of the scientists instrumental in its rapid evolution. Indeed, one of his first tasks, in the absence of a suitable commercially available instrument, was to build a gas mass spectrometer. Whilst at Oxford, Martin completed his DPhil, which he was awarded in 1963 and was appointed as Lecturer in Geochronology and Isotope Geology at University of Leeds, where he remained until his retirement in September 1992.
From the late 1960s it had become apparent that many age measurements did not record the age of formation of the rock sample, but some later stage in its geological history. It was in this area of research that Martin’s insights from theoretical physics became most strongly apparent, leading to his greatest scientific contribution to the field of geochronology. He developed a quantitative physical model, based on thermal diffusion, which related the measured age to a specific stage in the cooling of the rock from higher temperatures. This model went on to underpin the developing science of thermochronology and his 1973 paper, published in Contributions to Mineralogy & Petrology, continues to be regularly cited to this day (1200 citations, 50 citations in 2009 alone). Further development of the model in subsequent years led to quantitative modelling of variations in isotopic concentrations within samples that result from losses by diffusion and, in collaboration with Elizabeth (Buffy) McClelland, he extended these ideas into the field of palaeomagnetism.
Martin also made several fundamental technical contributions to the measurement of isotopic compositions, including the first systematic studies of error relationships in isotope dilution analysis and in particular the use of ‘double spiking’ to achieve greater precision and accuracy. He was also responsible for recognising the potential of diffusively enriched 38Ar in the early days of potassium-argon dating.
Extract from University of Leeds, 7 July 2010
Geoff Laslett (1949-2010)
The fission track community was very sad to learn of the untimely death of Geoff Laslett from cancer on 9th January 2010. To many he was a highly respected colleague and good friend.
Geoff was born in Mount Gambier, South Australia in 1949, and attended numerous schools around the state, as a result of his father’s work as a Methodist Minister in various rural parishes. He graduated from the University of Adelaide with first class honours and after completing his PhD in Statistics at the Australian National University, Geoff joined CSIRO (the Australian government scientific research organisation) in the division of Mathematics and Statistics, where he worked for most of his professional career.
His contribution to fission track analysis was immense. Practically everyone working in this field will be routinely using ideas, methods and practices that derive directly from him. Geoff’s involvement with fission track analysis began in the early 1980s, when he began a collaboration with geologists (Ian Duddy, Andy Gleadow, Paul Green and others) at the University of Melbourne and his contributions to fission track analysis range from the fundamental theoretical to the highly practical. He formulated the “line segment model” as a mathematical and statistical description of latent fission tracks inside a crystal. This is a stochastic process of line segments in three dimensional space, having varying lengths and random orientations. This model provides a means of understanding many important aspects of fission track measurements as well as a basis for quantitative analysis.
One of the products of this work was the well known “Laslett et al (1987)” kinetic model for fission track annealing in apatite. Geoff managed to fit a model to the laboratory annealing data which provides a more than passable description of the annealing behaviour in geological conditions, after extrapolation over up to 10 orders of magnitude in time! Geoff regarded his main achievement here as determining the form of the model, as well as providing a quantitative understanding of the annealing process. The “Laslett et al (1987)” kinetic model illustrates many of Geoff’s qualities as a mathematician and a scientist. Arrhenius plots to describe annealing kinetics had been around for a long time […] but no-one can remember now exactly who first thought of performing annealing experiments based on confined track lengths, in a monocompositional apatite, but if it wasn’t Geoff then the idea certainly came out of discussions in which he was involved. Geoff initiated this deep quantitative understanding, and without his brilliant and incisive input, who knows where we would be now.
Geoff will be sadly missed by us all, but his legacy will stay with us forever.
Extracted from obituaries written by Paul Green and Rex Galbraith, May 2010, http://www.ontrackforum.org.
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