Mosher Joins Hall of Distinction

December 12, 2023

Sharon Mosher, dean emeritus of the Jackson School of Geosciences, was inducted into the Jackson School Hall of Distinction in spring 2023.

The Hall of Distinction is one of the Jackson School’s top honors. It recognizes individuals with a strong affiliation with the school for accomplishments in academia, industry or government.

“I can think of no one worthier for this accomplishment,” said Dean Claudia Mora, who inducted Mosher into the hall during the school’s “Evening of Thanks” in March 2023, an annual event recognizing the school’s donors and supporters.

Mosher, who is also a professor emeritus, became dean in 2009. She spent more than a decade in that role, helping to build the school into one of the top geosciences institutions in the world. Mosher helped unite the school’s three diverse units — the Department of Geological Sciences (now the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences), the Bureau of Economic Geology and the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics — under a shared identity as the Jackson School of Geosciences.

But Mosher’s influence at The University of Texas at Austin began decades before she became dean. Mosher joined UT as an assistant professor in 1979 — the first female faculty member hired by the department. She ran the department’s field camp for 15 years, taught structural geology to undergraduate and graduate students, and served as chair of the department from 2007 to 2009.

Mosher’s scientific expertise is in structural geology, structural petrology and tectonics. Her primary research interests are in deformation along plate boundaries, the evolution of complexly deformed terranes, strain analysis, deformation mechanisms, and the interaction between chemical and physical processes during deformation. By her retirement in 2020, Mosher had supervised 35 master’s, 18 doctoral, and nine undergraduate honors students, along with three postdoctoral fellows.

In addition to leading the Jackson School, Mosher has served as the head of several professional societies. She served as president of the American Geosciences Institute from 2012 to 2013, president of the Geological Society of America from 2000 to 2001, and in 2004 as chair of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, an organization that represents about 1.5 million scientists nationwide.

She also served as the founder and chair of the board for GeoScienceWorld, a nonprofit and online database that aggregates a range of peer-reviewed research from geosciences professional societies in one place. Along with strengthening cross-society collaboration and research, the database has returned more than $38 million to membership societies since it launched in 2005.

Since stepping down as dean in 2020, one of Mosher’s biggest accomplishments has been to finish and publish “Vision and Change in the Geosciences: The Future of Undergraduate Geoscience Education.” The report is the culmination of a multiyear effort, funded by the National Science Foundation, that she led to help align undergraduate geosciences education with the needs of the modern workforce. Mosher is now leading a similar project for graduate geosciences education.

Mosher’s induction into the Hall of Distinction adds to a long list of awards and accolades. This includes the Marcus Milling Legendary Geoscientist Medal from the American Geosciences Institute; the Alumni Achievement Award from her alma mater, the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the Association of Women Geologists Outstanding Educator Award; and the Geological Society of America’s Distinguished Service Award.