Awards and Honors

October 16, 2023

Professor Jay Banner is a finalist for Baylor University’s 2024 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching. Banner is the director of The University of Texas at Austin Environmental Science Institute and a faculty member at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. He is one of three finalists for the prestigious teaching award. The finalists will present a series of lectures at Baylor in fall 2023 and a Cherry Award lecture on their home campuses. The winning professor will be announced by Baylor in spring 2024. The winner will receive $250,000 and a resident teaching position at Baylor during fall 2024 or spring 2025. The winner’s home department will also receive $25,000.

Tip Meckel, a senior research scientist at the Bureau of Economic Geology, has been named to a White House task force on carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS), a technology that can help mitigate climate change by storing carbon dioxide emissions in geologic formations where they are permanently isolated from the atmosphere. Meckel is among 35 experts selected by the White House Council on Environmental Quality to form a task force on CCUS permitting and development in federal lands and the outer continental shelf. Meckel is a researcher at the bureau’s Gulf Coast Carbon Center (GCCC), the largest academic research group in the country studying carbon storage, and has served as an expert technical resource on carbon storage for state lawmakers in Texas and Alaska, and federal committee meetings.

Senior Research Scientist John Snedden received the Don R. Boyd Medal for Excellence in Gulf Coast geology, the highest honor awarded by the Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies. Snedden is co-director of the Gulf Basin Depositional Synthesis program, a longstanding industry-funded research project at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, whose geologic maps and research have helped identify reservoirs for exploration, and provide important insights into the history of the basin’s geology and climate. The medal recognizes Snedden’s contributions to the study of the Gulf of Mexico and his role in characterizing it as an energy super basin — one of a small number of prolific geologic basins that supply the bulk of the world’s oil and gas.

The European Geosciences Union has awarded the 2023 Augustus Love Medal to Professor Thorsten Becker for outstanding research contributions in the field of geodynamics and for leadership and selfless service to the scientific community. The Love Medal is Europe’s highest honor in geodynamics — the study of convection in Earth’s solid mantle and of accompanying processes that shape the planet. The field includes plate tectonics, volcanism, mountain building and earthquakes. Although scientists have long understood that Earth’s solid interior can behave like a liquid over long periods of time, Becker was among the first to use computer modeling to understand the pattern of flow in the mantle and its effect on the planet. He is also leading research to better understand how earthquakes happen — an important step toward forecasting them.