Leigh "Wiki" H. Royden is an American Geologist.
Royden was born in Palo Alto, California. Royden's father was Halsey Royden, a mathematician.
Royden received an A.B. degree in physics from Harvard University and a PhD in geology and geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Royden became a member of the faculty at MIT in 1988. She is director of MIT's Experimental Study Group. [1] [2]
Royden has published important papers on thermal subsidence at the northeastern continental margin of North America and on retreating subduction boundaries formed during the collision of continental tectonic plates. [1]
In 1990, she was awarded the Donath Medal (Young Scientist Award) by the Geological Society of America. Royden was named a fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2004. [3] In 2011, she received the George P. Woollard Award. [1] In 2013, she was awarded the Stephan Mueller Medal by the European Geosciences Union. [2] In 2018, she was named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [4]
In 1994, Royden was one of 16 women faculty in the School of Science at MIT who drafted and co-signed a letter to the then-Dean of Science (now Chancellor of Berkeley) Robert Birgeneau, which started a campaign to highlight and challenge gender discrimination at MIT. [5]
Harry Hammond Hess was an American geologist and a United States Navy officer in World War II who is considered one of the "founding fathers" of the unifying theory of plate tectonics. He is best known for his theories on sea floor spreading, specifically work on relationships between island arcs, seafloor gravity anomalies, and serpentinized peridotite, suggesting that the convection of the Earth's mantle was the driving force behind this process.
Don Lynn Anderson was an American geophysicist who made significant contributions to the understanding of the origin, evolution, structure, and composition of Earth and other planets. An expert in numerous scientific disciplines, Anderson's work combined seismology, solid state physics, geochemistry and petrology to explain how the Earth works. Anderson was best known for his contributions to the understanding of the Earth's deep interior, and more recently, for the plate theory hypothesis that hotspots are the product of plate tectonics rather than narrow plumes emanating from the deep Earth. Anderson was Professor (Emeritus) of Geophysics in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He received numerous awards from geophysical, geological and astronomical societies. In 1998 he was awarded the Crafoord Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences along with Adam Dziewonski. Later that year, Anderson received the National Medal of Science. He held honorary doctorates from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Paris (Sorbonne), and served on numerous university advisory committees, including those at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, University of Chicago, Stanford, University of Paris, Purdue University, and Rice University. Anderson's wide-ranging research resulted in hundreds of published papers in the fields of planetary science, seismology, mineral physics, petrology, geochemistry, tectonics and the philosophy of science.
Rafael Luis Bras is a Puerto Rican civil engineer best known for his contributions in surface hydrology and hydrometeorology, including his work in soil-vegetation-atmosphere system modeling.
Maria T. Zuber is an American geophysicist who is the vice president for research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also holds the position of the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. Zuber has been involved in more than half a dozen NASA planetary missions aimed at mapping the Moon, Mars, Mercury, and several asteroids. She was the principal investigator for the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) Mission, which was managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Ronald M. Clowes, CM is a professor specializing in seismic and other geophysical studies of the Earth's lithosphere. For his work he has been appointed a member of the Order of Canada.
Tanya Atwater is an American geophysicist and marine geologist who specializes in plate tectonics. She is particularly renowned for her early research on the plate tectonic history of western North America.
Clarence Roderic Allen was an American geologist who studied seismology.
Alexandra Navrotsky is a physical chemist in the field of nanogeoscience. She is an elected member of the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the American Philosophical Society (APS). She was a board member of the Earth Sciences and Resources division of the NAS from 1995 until 2000. In 2005, she was awarded the Urey Medal, by the European Association of Geochemistry. In 2006, she was awarded the Harry H. Hess Medal, by the American Geophysical Union. She is currently the director of NEAT ORU, a primary program in nanogeoscience. She is distinguished professor at University of California, Davis.
Sean Carl Solomon is the director of the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, where he is also the William B. Ransford Professor of Earth and Planetary Science. Before moving to Columbia in 2012, he was the director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C. His research area is in geophysics, including the fields of planetary geology, seismology, marine geophysics, and geodynamics. Solomon is the principal investigator on the NASA MESSENGER mission to Mercury. He is also a team member on the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory mission and the Plume-Lithosphere Undersea Melt Experiment (PLUME).
George Edward Backus is an American geophysicist, best known for his work with J. Freeman Gilbert on inverse methods for geophysical data. He is also notably credited with advancing the dynamo theory on the origin of the Earth's magnetic field.
Anthony Brian Watts FRS is a British marine geologist and geophysicist and Professor of Marine Geology and Geophysics in the Department of Earth Sciences, at the University of Oxford.
Walter D. Mooney is a research seismologist and geophysicist at the United States Geological Survey (USGS), Menlo Park, California (1978–present). He was Chief of the USGS Branch of Seismology from 1994 to 1997.
Samuel A. Bowring was the Robert R. Schrock Professor Emeritus of Geology in the Dept. of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was expert in the field of U-Pb zircon geochronology, pushing the limits of geochronologic techniques to unprecedented analytical precision and accuracy and was expert in constraining rates of geologic processes and the timing of significant events in the geologic record. He investigated the explosion of multi-cellular life in the Early Cambrian as well as the end-Permian and the end-Cretaceous mass extinctions. He is also highly regarded for his work on the origin and evolution of continental crust, showing, for instance, that the Acasta Gneisses in the Northwest Territories of Canada were 4 billion years old.
Norman H. Sleep is an American geophysicist and professor of geophysics at Stanford University. He has done internationally recognized research on plate tectonics and many other areas of geology and planetology.
Lisa Tauxe is a geophysicist, professor and former department chair at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. Tauxe is a researcher and international authority on the behavior of the ancient geomagnetic field and applications of paleomagnetism to geological problems.
Roberta L. Rudnick is an American earth scientist and professor of geology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010 and was awarded the Dana Medal by the Mineralogical Society of America. Rudnick is a world expert in the continental crust and lithosphere.
Suzanne Mahlburg Kay is the William & Katherine Snee Professor of Geological Sciences at Cornell University. She studies the origin and evolution of the continental crust. She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, the American Geophysical Union and the Mineralogical Society of America.
Charlotte E. Keen is a Canadian geologist and professor emeritus at the Geological Survey of Canada. Her work focuses on the structure of the Earth's crust and the upper mantle using geophysical imaging and magnetic measurements. She was the first woman to go on a Canadian Survey Ship.
Mary Catherine Hill is an American hydrologist, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the winner of the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize and of the Dooge Medal of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences, a Darcy Lecturer for the National Ground Water Association, and Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America. After working for 33 years at the United States Geological Survey, she became a professor of geology at the University of Kansas.
Charles Lum Drake was an American geologist who was Professor of Geology at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.