Professor White is awarded the Gold Medal for a lifetime of distinguished achievement in solid Earth geophysics.
We are delighted that our Director Prof. Bob White has been awarded the “Gold Medal for a lifetime of distinguished achievement in solid Earth geophysics from the Royal Astronomical Society.
Announcement taken from the RAS official website.
The Royal Astronomical Society is pleased to announce the 2018 winners of its awards, medals and prizes. Each year the RAS recognises significant achievement in the fields of astronomy and geophysics through these awards. The announcements were made at the Ordinary Meeting of the society held on Friday 12 January 2018. The winners will be invited to collect their awards at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science in Liverpool in April. The Society’s highest honour is its Gold Medal, which can be awarded for any reason but usually recognises lifetime achievement. Past winners include Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, Arthur Eddington and Stephen Hawking. It was first awarded in 1824; since 1964 two have been awarded each year: one for astronomy, and one for geophysics. This year the winners of the Gold Medals are Professor James Hough, emeritus holder of the Kelvin Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and Robert White, Professor of Geophysics, Geodynamics and Tectonics at the University of Cambridge. Professor White is awarded the Gold Medal for a lifetime of distinguished achievement in solid Earth geophysics.
Professor Robert White, winner of the Gold Medal in geophysics. He has made fundamental, transformative contributions in five different areas of Earth science: mid-ocean ridges, mantle plumes and flood basalts, continental rifting, convergent margins, and dyke injection, seismicity and volcanism. Alongside his work in Cambridge, since 2010 he has also been an adjunct professor at the University of Iceland, where he studies volcanic rift processes and maps movement of magma beneath the surface. He has trained more than 50 students and post-doctoral researchers, many of whom have taken up senior faculty positions in academia and industry. Professor White’s early research career was in marine geophysics, where his work on magmatism associated with the early stages of rifting is probably the best known, most influential and most cited in his career so far. More recently, he has worked extensively and fruitfully in Iceland on the elevated Mid-Ocean Ridge where, in 2014-15, his group used an array of 75 broad-band seismometers to study a 46-kilometre-long dyke culminating in a surface eruption. His 250 peer reviewed publications on geodynamics and geophysics have been cited more than 5,500 times and are a testament to the huge impact he has had on our understanding of the solid Earth.
To read the full announcements of all the awards and details go to http://bit.ly/2AUDtLk