In recent years the International Standing Committee on Thermochronology has awarded the Dodson and Laslett prizes to recognize accomplishments by members of the community, and has always given awards to students who make the best presentations at the Thermo meetings. Starting in 2018, we began awarding the Charles and Nancy Naeser Prize for early-career thermochronologists. More information about each award can be found below, following the information about award recipients.
Nominations for these prizes are welcome, but are due well before the relevant Thermo meeting at which the prizes will be awarded. Please contact Max Zattin for information about how to submit nominations and what materials are required.
Awards Subcommittee of the ISCT. The ISCT maintains this subcommittee, which is chaired by a member of the ICST but can include members from the community and the ISCT itself. Information about the committee and the process it uses can be found in the ISCT by-laws. Current subcommittee members are:
- Max Zattin (Chair)
- Eva Enkelmann
- Matthew Fox
- Rong Yang
- Cornelia Spiegel
>> 2023 Recipients
2023 Laslett Prize to Rex Galbraith (University College London)
The 2023 Laslett Prize recognizes Rex’s enormous contributions to the development of statistical tools used by thermochronologists, including the radial plot, random effects models, and finite mixture models. His role in designing fission track inter-laboratory calibration studies and analysis of the results has provided a template for subsequent inter-laboratory calibration studies.
2023 Dodson Prize to Mark Harrison (UCLA)
The year’s Dodson Prize recognizes Mark’s pivotal role in developing the field of thermochronology. He has pioneered the use of the 40Ar/39Ar dating as a quantitative thermochronologic tool, determined the systematics and kinetics of diffusion for a number of different systems, and demonstrated the importance of thermochronology in studying a wide range of earth-science problems.
2023 Charles and Nancy Naeser Prize to Sarah Falkowski (University of Tübingen) and Kalin McDannell (Dartmouth College)
Our latest award recognizes Sarah for her use of multiple thermochronologic data sets to address first-order processes such as the role of climate and tectonic processes in orogenic systems. The award recognizes Kalin for his role in the development of the controlled ramped heating (CRH) method to investigate excess dispersion in apatite (U-Th)/He ages, and for his work investigating methods to extract better thermal history information from apatite fission-track data sets showing evidence of multi-kinetic behavior.
>> Previous Prize Recipients
2023 Dodson Prize: Mark Harrison
2023 Laslett Prize: Rex Galbraith
2023 Charles and Nancy Naeser Prize: Sarah Falkowski & Kalin McDannell
2020/2021 Dodson Prize: Richard Ketcham & Kerry Gallagher
2020/2021 Laslett Prize: Diane Seward & Barry Kohn
2020/2021 Charles and Nancy Naeser Prize: William Guenthner
2018 Dodson Prize: Andrew Carter
2018 Laslett Prize: Günther Wagner
2018 Charles and Nancy Naeser Prize: Alexis Ault, Marissa Tremblay
2016 Dodson Prize: Peter Zeitler
2016 Laslett Prize: Charles (Chuck) W. Naeser
2014 Dodson Prize: Oscar Lovera
2014 Laslett Prize: Andrew Gleadow
2012 Dodson Prize: Martin Dodson
>> Information about the Awards
Dodson Prize. This prize is awarded on behalf of the international thermochronology community by the ISCT 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 honor of Martin Dodson, the pioneer of quantitative thermochronology, who died at age 78 on 27 June 2010.
Laslett Prize. This prize is awarded on behalf of the international thermochronology community by the ISCT 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 honor, Geoff Laslett, a pioneer of quantitative fission-track analysis and an outstanding scientist and statistician, who died on 9th January 2010.
Charles and Nancy Naeser Prize: This prize is awarded on behalf of the international thermochronology community by the ISCT to an early-career scientist who has made an outstanding and/or innovative contribution to our field. The award is named in honor of Charles “Chuck” and Nancy Naeser in recognition of their ground-breaking fundamental work in the field of thermochronology over many years (Chuck died on 18 November 2016). Eligibility requires the candidate to be actively engaged in the field and seven years or less out from their Ph.D. award (excluding periods of parental or unpaid leave during which the candidate was not working).