GL alum Francis McCubbin is the recent recipient of the 2017 F.W. Clarke Award from the Geochemical Society, AND the Nier Prize from the Meteoritical Society. The two medals are the awards from each society for outstanding early career scientists, and Francis is only the second person to win both.
The Clarke Award recognizes an early-career scientist for a single outstanding contribution to geochemistry or cosmochemistry published either as a single paper or a series of papers on a single topic. McCubbin is recognized for his work on water in apatite that changed our understanding of volatiles in the moon. The award was formally presented at the Goldschmidt 2017 conference in Paris, France.
The Nier Prize recognizes outstanding research in meteoritics and closely allied fields by young scientists. The scholarly accomplishments that make McCubbin a most deserving Nier Prize recipient are his pioneering work on extraterrestrial apatite to constrain the water content of the lunar and Martian interiors, and studies of magmatic, hydrothermal, and surface processes in the inner solar system. Specifically, there is a series of 18 first-author papers by McCubbin, published since 2008, that forms the foundation of his impressive contribution to this area of research.
McCubbin is currently the astromaterials curator in the NASA Johnson Space Center's Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division. He was a Carnegie Fellow at the Geophysical Laboratory from 2009-2011 working with Andrew Steele, Bjorn Mysen and DTM's Erik Hauri.
We are so proud of these to awards that Francis has received and wish him a heart felt congratulations!
Check out an interview with Francis about his awards here.
