This year the committee will award the Steno Medal to Janne Blichert-Toft, a geologist with a Masters and PhD from the University of Copenhagen who has since built an impressive research career in France. The medal will be awarded to her on the 24 April, kl 16 at the Geological Museum, and will include presentations (aimed at a general audience) by several highly respected international geologists and Janne herself.Janne Blichert-Toft is a geochemist specializing in radiogenic isotopes with applications to geochronology, terrestrial and planetary mantle-crust evolution and mantle dynamics, early Earth geodynamics, planetology, cosmochemistry, meteoritics, and archeometry. She is perhaps best known in the geochemical community for playing a fundamental role in establishing analytical techniques for the Lu-Hf isotope system by MC-ICPMS. The method has since been applied by Blichert-Toft and others to make invaluable contributions to our understanding of Earth’s geochemical evolution, in particular to understanding the early history of the Earth and Solar System and Earth’s geochemical dynamics.
Janne received her Ph.D. from the University of Copenhagen in 1993, where she worked together with Minik Rosing. Since then she has been employed at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France, first as a Marie-Curie post-doc, later as Director of Research from 2002, and as deputy head of department of Laboratoire de Géologie since 2007.
She has received numerous awards, including Geochemistry Fellow of the Geochemical Society and the European Association of Geochemistry (2010), Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (2012) and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Silver Medal (2012).
She is Associate Editor of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (2011-….), Editor of Geochemical Perspectives (2013-….), and Editor of G-Cubed (2013-2016).
A recent search on Web of Science found 150 articles (including 9 in Nature and 5 in Science), an H-index of 43, and over 8000 citations, including 1 article with over 1000 citations, and seven articles with over 200 citations.
Programme:
16.00: Welcome
16.10: John Ludden, Executive Director, British Geological Survey: Lighting up the subsurface
16.40: Albrecht Hofmann, Adjunct Senior Scientist Columbia University: Did giant volcanic eruptions kill the dinosaurs?
17.10: Minik Rosing, Professor, Geological Museum Copenhagen: The emergence of Earth’s continents
17.40: Præmieoverækkelse
18.00: Janne Blichert-Toft, Director of Research, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon: In Steno’s footsteps using radiogenic isotopes
18.40: reception
