Stuart Ross Taylor (1925-2021)
Stuart Ross Taylor, Leonard Medalist (1998) and former president of the Meteoritical Society (1989-1990) passed away at his home in Canberra, Australia, this month. Ross was a geochemist who made seminal contributions to our understanding of the origin and evolution of Earth’s continental crust, and the composition and origin of the Moon, meteorites, tektites, and the solar system. Born in Ashburton, New Zealand in 1925, he received a BSc and MSc Hons from the University of New Zealand followed by a PhD in 1954 at the University of Indiana, USA, where he studied under fellow Kiwi Brian Mason. Taylor was Mason’s only PhD student and Mason himself was the last PhD student of Victor Moritz Goldschmidt. Following his PhD, Ross became a tenured lecturer at Oxford University where he worked with Louis Ahrens and built an emission spectroscopy laboratory. More…
Günter W. Lugmair (1940-2021)
Günter W. Lugmair passed away on March 31 after a short illness. A Fellow of the Meteoritical Society since 1980 when he also served as an organizer of the Annual Meeting in La Jolla, and winner of the society’s Leonard Medal, Günter’s mastery of the mass spectrometer pushed the precision of isotopic measurements to new levels. He pioneered the applications of new radiometric systems and measurements of nucleosynthetic anomalies to fundamentally advance our understanding of the processes operating in the early Solar System. More…
James J. Papike (1937-2020)
James J. Papike passed away on Dec. 21, 2020, at the age of 83. He was emeritus director of the Institute of Meteoritics, University of New Mexico and Fellow of the Meteoritical Society. He was active in and had been an officer or councilor in the Mineralogical Society of America (president), the American Geophysical Union, the Geochemical Society (president), the Society of Economic Geologists, the National Academy of Sciences, the Universities Space Research Association, and numerous other professional organizations. More…
H. Jay Melosh (1947-2020)
H. Jay Melosh (Purdue University) passed away on September 11, 2020, after a five-decade career in impact geophysics. Jay received the Barringer Medal (1999) and was a Fellow of the Meteoritical Society. More…