Jaeger Medal
Award highlights
- The award is made to a scientist for investigations of a high order into the solid Earth or its oceans carried out in Australia or having some connection with Australian Earth science.
- This award honours the contribution of the late Professor John Conrad Jaeger, FAA, FRS, to Australian Earth science
The Jaeger Medal is a career award made in honour of the contribution of the late Professor John Conrad Jaeger, FAA, FRS, to Australian Earth science. The award is made to a scientist for investigations of a high order into the solid Earth or its oceans carried out in Australia or having some connection with Australian Earth science. Although work carried out during a candidate's entire career will be taken into consideration, special weight will be given to recent research. The award is normally made every two years.
This award is open to nominations for candidates from all genders. The Australian Academy of Science encourages nominations of female candidates and of candidates from a broad geographical distribution.
Career awards recognise achievement over a career of whatever length.
Candidates may be put forward for more than one award. If a proposed candidate is already the recipient of an Academy award, the second award must be for a distinct, additional, body of work undertaken since the first award, and/or work in a different field.
Key dates
Below are the key dates for the nomination process. While we aim to keep to this schedule, some dates may change depending on circumstances.
GUIDELINES
The following guidelines and FAQs provide important information about eligibility, submission requirements, and assessment processes. Please review them carefully before submitting a nomination.
How to nominate a scientist for the Academy’s honorific awards
The following guidelines contain detailed information for nominators.
These guidelines contain information for honorific award nominators.
The following guidelines contain information for honorific award referees.
These guidelines contain information for honorific award referees.
Please submit your nominations using the Nominate button found on the top right of this webpage when nominations are open.
Please note the Academy uses a nomination platform that is external to the main Academy site. Nominators will be required to create an account on the platform. Even if you are familiar with the nomination process, please allow extra time to familiarise yourself with the platform.
Early-career, mid-career and career medals
Can I nominate myself?
- No – you must be nominated by someone else. Self-nominations are not accepted.
Can I submit a nomination on behalf of someone else?
- Yes – you can submit a nomination on behalf of someone else if you are not the nominator. An example would be a university grants office or personal/executive assistant completing the online nomination form on behalf of a nominator. Once the form is submitted, the nominator will be sent an email confirming that the nomination has been completed. If a nominee submits a nomination for themselves on behalf of a nominator it will not be considered a self-nomination.
Residency requirements
- Winners of all awards except the Haddon Forrester King Medal should be mainly resident in Australia and/or have a substantive position in Australia at the time of the nomination deadline. Unless explicitly stated in the awarding conditions, the research being put forward for the award should have been undertaken mainly in Australia. Some awards have more specific conditions that the relevant selection committee must apply and nominators are advised to read the conditions associated with each award very carefully.
Honorific career eligibility (more specific details found in the honorific awards nominator guidelines and the honorific award post PhD eligibility guidelines)
- Career eligibility is calculated by calendar year.
- Early career awards are open to researchers up to 10 years post-PhD.*
- Mid-career awards are open to researchers between eight and 15 years post-PhD.*
- Please note that the Awards Committee may consider nominees with post PhD dates outside of these ranges if a career exemption request is being submitted with the nomination, further guidelines on career exemption requests can be found in the nomination guidelines.
- See the post-PhD eligibility guidelines document for relevant conferral dates.
- * or equivalent first higher degree e.g. D.Phil., D.Psych., D.Sc.
Academy fellowship requirements in award nominations
- Fellows and non-Fellows of the Academy can provide nominations for either Fellows or non-Fellows for all awards.
Women only awards
- The Dorothy Hill, Nancy Millis and Ruby Payne-Scott Medals are for women only. These medals are open to nominees who self-identify as a woman in the award nomination form. The Academy does not require any statement beyond a nominee’s self-identification in the nomination form.
- This practice is consistent with the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, which has recognised the non-binary nature of gender identity since 2013, and gives effect to Australia’s international human rights obligations. The Academy remains committed to the fundamental human rights principles of equality, freedom from discrimination and harassment, and privacy, as well as the prevention of discrimination on the basis of sex and gender identity.
PREVIOUS AWARDEES
Professor Hugh O’Neill FAA FRS, Monash University
Professor Hugh O’Neill is a widely recognised international leader in the field of experimental petrology and geochemistry with applications to the understanding of planetary processes. His research addresses many aspects of the chemical behaviour of minerals and rocks through detailed laboratory studies complemented by thermodynamic modelling. The resulting insights elucidate the diverse processes by which Earth and other planetary bodies were formed and their subsequent chemical evolution. His influential research has provided new insights into the formation of the Moon through the impact with Earth of a Mars-sized body, the segregation and composition of Earth’s iron-rich metallic core, the redox conditions prevailing within Earth’s interior, and the generation of basaltic magmas by partial melting within Earth’s upper mantle.
Professor Matthew England FAA, University of New South Wales
Professor Matthew England is recognised as one of the world’s foremost experts on the ocean’s role in climate, spanning time-scales from seasons to millennia. His field of research spans physical oceanography and climate dynamics, where he has written seminal papers on global water-mass formation, ocean-atmosphere-ice interactions, modes of climate variability, and ocean overturning processes. His work has afforded profound insights into the circulation of the Pacific, Indian, and Southern oceans and their role in global and regional climate. He has quantified the Southern Ocean overturning circulation and its impact on climate, in both present and past climates; he identified the critical importance of the Southern Annular Mode in driving trends and variability in the coupled ocean – ice – atmosphere system; and he has shed new light on the teleconnections between the tropics and Antarctica.
Professor John Church FAA FTSE, UNSW Sydney
Professor John Church is one of Australia’s leading oceanographers whose theoretical and observational work on the dynamics of the oceans has led to a deep understanding of the physics of recent sea-level change, both globally and for the Australia–Pacific region. He has played a leading role in establishing a consistent and robust record of sea level change—integrating the traditional tide gauge records with satellite radar altimetry data; identifying its temporal as well as regional variability; developing a deep understanding of the processes driving this change; and providing quantitative projections of future change under different climate scenarios that he has been able to observationally test. His work has contributed to the assessments of the science of climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change and to the World Climate Research Program, and in the public debate on the evidence and underlying science of climate change.
Professor Dietmar Müller FAA, University of Sydney
Professor Müller is internationally renowned for leading the construction of a Virtual Earth Laboratory to ‘see’ deep into Earth in four dimensions (space and time). This laboratory draws together custom software, workflows and data to produce open-access models of Earth’s dynamic history. It has been accessed by users from 183 countries and many disciplines. Novel applications led by Professor Müller include the development of a deep-time global sea level model and combined geodynamic, tectonic and surface topography models unravelling the origins and history of continental landscapes, environments and sedimentary basins. He showed how the uplift of the eastern Australian highlands is dominated by dynamic topography due to plate–mantle interaction. He recently developed an innovative approach for understanding the deep oceanic carbon cycle by showing how variations in ocean bottom water temperature and tectonic cycles drive fluctuations in seafloor weathering, crustal CO2 storage and atmospheric CO2 content.
2017
Emeritus Professor Ross William Griffiths FAA, Australian National University
Professor Griffiths’ influential research in fluid dynamics has focused on the fundamental physics of phenomena of importance in geophysics. He has contributed to the understanding of thermal and multi-component convection, the dynamics of rotating density-stratified flows, the instability of ocean currents, the formation and interactions of ocean eddies, and the global overturning circulation. He has influenced solid-earth geophysics through studies of convection in the Earth’s solid mantle and its interactions with the Earth’s surface, and provided dynamical insights in physical vulcanology through studies of cooling, solidifying lava flows. His contributions to oceanography, geophysics and geology have been made using careful theoretical and laboratory studies of the fluid dynamics and have involved collaboration across multiple disciplines.
2015
Professor Trevor J McDougall FAA FRS, University of New South Wales
Professor McDougall is internationally renowned for his ground-breaking work on ocean mixing processes and the thermodynamics of seawater. He has identified new mixing processes; defined neutral density surfaces along which mesoscale eddies mix; shown how lateral mixing processes should be included in ocean models; and redefined all the thermodynamic variables used in oceanography. His discoveries have improved ocean climate models and changed the way oceanographic data are analysed, increasing the accuracy of the science and confidence in models of the coupled atmosphere-ocean-ice climate system.
2013
Professor Roger Powell FAA, University of Melbourne
The continental crust is a patchwork of metamorphic rocks transformed deep beneath the Earth’s surface. Understanding the physical conditions in which such metamorphic rocks form is the main focus of Professor Roger Powell’s research. Through the application of the principles of equilibrium thermodynamics to mineral systems he has provided both the methodological framework and the computer software that allows metamorphic geologists to recover the formation conditions of metamorphic rocks. using equilibrium thermodynamics, mathematics and statistics
2011
Professor Ian Jackson, Australian National University
Ian Jackson’s research has centred on laboratory study of the physical properties of geological and analogue materials under conditions simulating those of the Earth's deep interior. This has involved the intensive development of novel methods for the measurement and analysis of elastic and near-elastic behaviour related to the speeds and attenuation of earthquake waves. Such laboratory-based insights find application in the interpretation of seismological models for the Earth’s internal structure in terms of temperature and chemical composition.
2009
Professor Malcolm McCulloch FAA, Australian National University
Malcolm McCulloch is a geochemist who has made major contributions to both the study of the solid Earth and environmental issues. He has had a major impact on studies of the evolution of the Earth’s crust. Recently he has studied sea-level changes and past ocean temperatures, the impacts of environmental change on coral reefs through nutrient fluxes into the ocean, and the effects of increasing ocean acidity associated with higher atmospheric carbon-dioxide. His work on material incorporated into the skeletons of corals on the Great Barrier Reef has demonstrated the way in which the progress of human settlement in Queensland has affected the nature of the waters reaching the reef and has already begun to influence water-catchment management.
2007
Professor Ian McDougall, Australian National University
Ian McDougall has an extraordinary record of scientific achievement in the fields of plate tectonics, geochronology, planetary noble gas evolution, and the origin and evolution of humans. In addition to making fundamental contributions to plate tectonics by precise dating of the large-scale movement of oceanic plates, his work provides the benchmark for our understanding of hominid evolution in East Africa. This is exemplified by his recent dating of the new species Australopithecus anamensis, a finding that provides new insights into our understanding of the genesis of our own species.
2005—B.L.N. Kennett
2003—A.J.W. Gleadow
2001—B.E. Hobbs
1998—J.R. Philip
1995—K. Lambeck
1993—A.E. Ringwood
1990—D.H. Green
