University of Toronto geochemist Barbara Sherwood Lollar was been awarded the Gerhard Herzberg Gold Medal for Science and Engineering by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada . The award is give annually for “an individual who has demonstrated sustained excellence and influence in research for a body of work conducted in Canada that has substantially advanced the fields of natural sciences or engineering.”
Barbara Sherwood Lollar is an internationally recognized earth scientist. Her work has, for example, revealed subsurface lifeforms thriving in conditions that scientists had hitherto thought were uninhabitable. This research has helped to develop techniques for analyzing the chemistry of water near the surface and for also tracking how contaminants from industrial sites may or may not be broken down by bacteria. These investigations are helping to find solutions for environmental remediation.
The term ‘4D Earth’ is about thinking about the planet below the surface. Beneath the surface there are vast stores of water, and in that water teams microbial, fungal and viral life, and these can reveal significant information about the workings of the planet.
Dr. Sherwood Lollar is currently a Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto. Speaking of the award, she says: “It is incredibly exciting for NSERC’s Herzberg Medal to recognize research on groundwater, the water cycle and subsurface processes. No award of this nature is a solo act. The recognition shines a light on the broad and diverse teams of students, postdocs and collaborators who I have had the honour of working with over so many years.”
In April 2019, Dr. Sherwood Lollar was selected by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research to co-lead an international program of exploration of the deep Earth, a program that builds on her previous work.
The award, which has been in place since 1991, comes with a guarantee of $1 million over five years to use for personal research. The award is named after Gerhard Herzberg, winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the German-Canadian who developed an understanding of the electronic structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals.
