Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 72 (2008) S7–S8 www.elsevier.com/locate/gca
Awards Ceremony Speech
Acceptance of the 2007 F.W. Clarke Medal
Madame President, fellow geochemists and guests: I am deeply honored to accept this award today. My sincerest thanks go to the Geochemical Society, the Clarke Medal Committee, and to those who nominated and supported me for this recognition. I have been incredibly fortunate to work with some truly outstanding people, some of whom are Clarke Medalists themselves. To join a list today that already includes several of my personal mentors such as Don DePaolo, Bruce Watson, and Paul Asimow is truly humbling, and perhaps provides me the best perspective on what this award represents. I have so many to thank in this brief time. During my undergraduate days at Yale, I was inspired and encouraged by the faculty including Brian Skinner, Danny Rye, and in particular Jay Ague. Jay was and is one of my closest mentors and I am very pleased that we have maintained and strengthened our scientific collaborations and our friendship to this day.
doi:10.1016/j.gca.2007.12.027
At Berkeley, finding Don DePaolo as my advisor was one of the best decisions of my career. We discovered we shared interests in the rates of metamorphic processes, and my thesis grew from that. I am indebted to Don for his guidance, mentorship, and encouragement, during all my years at Berkeley and until the present day. Among other things, Don showed by example the value of enjoying a genuine curiosity in a broad range of scientific topics, all pursued with careful measurements, rigorous modeling, and elegant simplicity. My time at Berkeley would also not have been the same without the camaraderie of undergrads, fellow grad students, and post-docs, too numerous to list. I thank them all, but in particular, I wish to thank my office mate of two years, Julie Bryce, who remains a great friend and colleague. Next to Don, I think she knows more about the ups and downs of my thesis than anyone else. While my thesis decidedly focused on metamorphic reaction rates, I decided on a whim to try my hand at Ar geochronology with Paul Renne at the BGC. The plan was to get a
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Conference report / Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 72 (2008) S7–S8
quick and dirty biotite age and call it a day. That quick and dirty age got a lot more interesting and has burgeoned into a major component of my research since then. My post-doc at Caltech, under the patient guidance of Paul Asimow and Ken Farley was a difficult experimental study of the partitioning of noble gases in grain boundaries. In addition to Paul and Ken, I must thank Jed Mosenfelder and Pete Burnard for teaching me almost everything I know about piston-cylinder experiments and noble gas mass spectrometry during many hours in the lab. In more recent work, I have been fortunate to join forces with Bruce Watson at RPI and Simon Kelley at the Open University in an experimental study of noble gas partitioning and diffusivity in crustal minerals. Both have inspired me by their unselfish approach to science, their willingness to generously share both their time and their ideas, as well as their willingness to explore new ones.
In closing, I would like to thank my colleagues and students at Boston University for their comraderie and support during my early career. And, I have to thank my wife, Leanne, and my family for their support and patience during all these years of hard work, garnet talk around the dinner table, and late nights in the lab.
Ethan F. Baxter Department of Earth Sciences, Boston University, 685 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, USA E-mail address:
[email protected] Received 20 December 2007 accepted in revised form 25 December 2007; Available online 30 March 2008