At the 14th International Symposium in Stockholm the IPA honoured the following people, for our various awards:
Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients
Svante Björck
Professor emeritus Svante Björck (born 1948, retired 2015) has had a huge impact on Swedish Quaternary geology and on general Quaternary sciences world-wide, especially within palaeoclimatology and geochronology. His contributions to science have been based almost entirely on studies of lake sediments.Svante’s research has had a continuous focus on environmental reconstruction based on multi-proxy analysis of carefully dated sediment sequences from various types of lakes. One of his main contributions was the final synchronization of climate records reflecting the Younger Dryas – Preboreal transition obtained from lake sediments, tree-ring series and Greenland ice cores, a well-cited study published in Science in 1996.Svante’s work has also led to substantially increased insight into the development of the Baltic Basin, manifested by a key paper in Quaternary International in 1995. Radiocarbon dating has been one of his main interests and working tools, and in 2002 he received a major grant for a new single-stage AMS facility in Lund.
Sumin Wang
Sumin Wang is the pioneer of limnological research and also the founding father of paleolimnology in China. In the early 1980’s he initiated a key project funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences which surveyed and sampled more than 500 Chinese lakes over 5 years. This led to the compilation of the “Encyclopaedia of Lakes in China”. To date this Encyclopaedia still serves as the primary source for palaeolimnologists, geographers and geologists in China. Sumin was instrumental in the a large ICDP project on the Tibetan Plateau, deriving the first multi-proxy record covering c. 2.8 Ma years, from this region. He has been a great inspiration and figurehead of paleolimnology in China.
Krystyna Szeroczynska
Krystyna Szeroczynska was awarded for her remarkable contributions in Cladocera research and teaching, as well as mentoring of students and Science outreach. She has dedicated her career to the advancement of the use of subfossil Cladocera to track past environmental changes in lakes. Krystyna is committed to transfer knowledge about the use of bioindicators in the reconstruction of past environmental conditions to a non-scientific audience by means of very clear and enthusiastic communication. She founded the paleolimnology section at the Polish Limnological Society and has been a member of numerous scientific Committees since 1992. Furthermore, Krystyna has contributed in several scientific projects; she developed long-term and fruitful international partnerships, particularly in Europe and Asia, coordinated projects related to climate change and acidification of mountain lakes.
Sheri Fritz
Sheri’s recent research focuses on paleoclimatology and paleohydrology of the NA Great Plains & Northern Rocky Mountains. As well as reconstructing the climate history and evolution of biodiversity in tropical South America. She has published a great many papers across a wide range of disciplines, teaching and advising students and post-doctoral researchers so they can follow in her footsteps. She has collaborated with many colleagues in so many different fields, giving generously, tirelessly, and efficiently, to the global scientific community. She is the leader of PAGES and AMQUA. Sheri has also been recognized with illustrious awards from other societies, including the EGU Hans Oeschger Medal and the AAAS Fellow.
Dan Engstrom
Dan’s work includes the long-term response of prairie lakes, in particular their water salinity, to changes in climate. The common theme of these studies is the impact of landscape and climate change on lake ecology, and how these changes are recorded in the lake sediment record. More recently, Dan has begun studies on wilderness lakes to identify why some lakes have experienced unprecedented algal blooms in recent decades, apparently in response to a warming climate. Dan helped develop the 210Pb dating method, resulting in his own laboratory that now dates sediment from all over the world. Dan also refined sediment coring equipment and methods to increase the detail at which sediment could be sub-sampled for analysis. These methods were used to document the widespread deposition of mercury (Hg) not only locally, but also across North America. Dan has also investigated toxins beyond Hg and other heavy metals in lake-sediment cores. His research has been at the forefront of understanding the source of these loads and the mechanisms of lake response to human stressors.
Outstanding Service Awards
Oliver Heiri and Steffen Mischke
Both are currently the longest-standing Associate Editors of the Journal of Paleolimnology. Oliver Heiri has served as Associate Editor of JOPL for the last 10 years, and Steffen Mischke has served for the last 8 years, both providing exceptionally conscientious and commendable service.
Early Career Awards
Jenny Korosi
Jennifer’s productivity and scholarship are extensive. Her over 30 papers (which include contributions to Nature Communications, 3 with Proc. Roy Soc., etc.) are characterized by their originality, broadness of scope, and above all scientific impact. Her ongoing research requires a strong background in ecosystem science, limnology, taxonomy, chemistry, statistics, physical geography, as well as related biological, environmental and earth science disciplines. Her new research includes the development of new proxies, such as plant biomarkers. Furthermore, her recent work in biogeochemistry, blending geology and biology with chemistry and ecotoxicology, was further testament to her creativity and scientific prowess, as she co-develops the new field of “paleoexotoxicology”.
Jean-Philippe Jenny
Jean-Philippe’s publications and efforts have impressed scientists both within the paleolimnological community and beyond. He initially tested the idea to use the presence of laminated sediments to track down the evolution of hypoxia across a much larger database of lakes. By collaborating with the PAGES Varve Working group and other scientists, Jean-Philippe spearheaded several syntheses using these records. Initially this work was published in Global Change Biology, and was received with great interest. A second publication in PNAS then delved into these records further, linking for the first time the relative role of different forcing factors in producing laminations in lake sediments.Following this, the thrust of his more recent project has been to integrate paleolimnological approaches with ecosystem modeling to quantify the magnitude and heterogeneity in soil erosion across 6 continents over the past ~300 years.
Springer Student Oral Paper Awards
IPA Award: Tsai-Wen Lin, National Taiwan University, Taipei
IAL Award: Christine Chen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Highly commended: Jeremy McCormack, Ruhr University Germany Yoav Ben Dor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Maurycy Zarczynski, University of Gdansk, Poland
Springer Student Poster Awards IPA Award: Luis Rodrigo Martinez Abarca, UNAM, Mexico IAL Award: Leticia Martin-Bello, University of Zaragoza, Spain Quaternary Journal Award: Daniel Vondrak, Charles University, Prague, Czechia
Highly commended: Alexander Bolland, Institute of Plant Sciences, University of Bern, Switzerland Rebecca Doyle, The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada Matej Roman, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia
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