One of the great things about being a
geochronologist is that you can delve back in time to when unfinished blog
posts were abandoned, and drag them screaming into the present to be finished.
-When nominated, women are about as likely
as men to win society awards.
-However, nominations skew more male than
the general population of scientists
-Nominators are mostly crusty old farts,
and young scientists (young meaning anyone under 50) are not stepping up and
nominating people.
I forgot all about this pressing issue
until June (still 2014), when the MGPV division of the Geological Society of
America announced that they would be awarding a new early career scientist
prize. At that point, I suddenly recalled the issue, and thought, “Might this be a testable hypothesis? What happens when some random industrial scientist
barely 40 years old tries nominating?”
I’d sat through a few award ceremonies
before, and seen these sorts of things handed out to a wide variety of
scientists, from really cool people I’d never heard of to the banal big names
who had spent a quarter of a century cruising on achievements from when I was
in high school. But in most cases, the nominees were very senior, old,
respected scientists. And they nominated other, slightly less old but otherwise
very similar scientists. I suppose their point of view is that if they’re
great, other great people ought to be pretty similar.
I am not a great scientist. I’m a
disorganized industry hack whose H-index can be tallied on the fingers of Count
Rugen’s hand. So the way I see it, anyone I nominate for a prize should be as
unlike me as possible. So from there it was an easy step to revisit the
nomination gap studies, and think, “Might there be, perhaps, any women who
would be appropriate for this award?” Luckily, our nominee came to mind almost
immediately.
As someone who went through college
loathing political correctness, my first thought was therefore, “OK, now am I
cutting any more deserving nominees out here by nominating her?” As it turns
out, when I was still working at the ANU (see the first three years of this
blog) we had many really good grad students. However, none of them really took
ownership of their favorite field of science and made it their own the way our
nominee did, so I was satisfied that I had made a good choice.
The GSA Junk Mail that announced the
creation of a new award came out in June 20 of 2014, I probably read it and
connected it back to the earlier exhortations to nominate about a week or two
later, around the end of the month. The trouble was, the deadline for
nominations was the 15th of July. And I didn’t start approaching people for
supporting letters until the second.
My strategy was simple: Here in Canberra, cruise the ANU
hallways to figure out who was actually in town and able to put something
together on zero notice. I threw the Japanese postdoc into the too-hard basket,
as I didn’t personally know any of the people she worked with there, and also
language barrier, and concentrated on her colleagues at DTM. I also approached
some big names in the field with whom she hadn’t collaborated, to see if they
thought it was a sensible nomination and would be willing to write something
supportive from more of a peer review perspective.
I was pleasantly surprised at how
enthusiastic most of the people I approached were. I guess the good thing about
picking a good candidate, however, is that people really do get excited and are
willing to get on board and turn letters around in remarkably quick timescales.
I had my three supporters lines up by the seventh, and three letters in hand
within hours of the deadline. In responsible, organized nominator fashion, I
had my nomination letter done a whallopping three days before the deadline, and
circulated it to the rest of the team for a science check and general feedback
(as I had never done this before).
Around the time of the deadline, a
potential referee who had been out of contact emailed me saying that he really
wanted to write a fourth letter, and could the deadline be extended? So I asked
the coordinator, and he said that as long as a complete submission package was
in on time, we could have a week or two to get additional bonus letters in. One
such letter was submitted.
Fast forward nine months:
There’s an email in my inbox from our nominee:
“Hi Chuck,
Here is the letter that I
woke up to today!!!! Thanks so much!!!”
And that is how Dr. Frances Elaine Jenner won
the Geological Society of America’s inaugural MGPV early career award. The only
sad part of the story was that I was not able to go to the GSA meeting where
the award was presented, so one of the guys who wrote a letter of support gave
the citation. He’s a proper academic scientist anyway, so probably had the
gravitas that I lack. The citation and acceptance are on page 8-10 of thisnewsletter.
The point of all this story is this: It is
possible for mid career non-academic scientists to throw together a nomination
at the last minute, and get support from respected scientists, and construct a
nomination package sufficient to win the prize. Don’t die wondering, folks.
Now, I should point out that I did have a
few things tilted in my favor:
Firstly I attended a number of top
institutions during my academic career, which put me in contact with top
scientists like Dr. Jenner. Having a great candidate goes a long way towards
making a case.
Secondly,
I’ve been kicking around science in one capacity or another to know her
referees, several of whom were quite respected scientists. I was reasonably
acquainted with three of the four supporters I got letters from, and had at
least been to the fourth guy’s lab.
Thirdly, once the decision was made to go, I went all out. This isn't the sort of thing to be half-assed. I read all her papers, and tried to put together a passionate yet logical case for why they made our nominee a prizeworthy scientist.
I’m sure the greybeards who get together at
annual meetings to sip nasty scotch plan out their conventional safe picks way
in advance, but with a little passion, some broad thinking, and a genuine
enthusiasm for science, anyone can nominate for their respective society’s
awards, and win. And there’s a month and a half to go before the deadline forthe 2019 award, so don’t be shy, y’all.
* True calendar years; -0.000064 using the
1950 zero year favoured by 14C weirdos.
And in case anyone wants the really nitty
gritty details, here’s the nomination I wrote in a sleep deprived haze during the first week of July 2014. Typos and all:
Nomination for Frances Jenner
Dear Division Secretary,
I would like to nominate Frances Elaine
Jenner for the GSA’s MGPV division early career award for 2015. Dr. Jenner is an outstanding young analytical
geochemist who has pioneered several novel analytical techniques and applied
them to igneous rocks from a wide temporal and geographical range. Her ability to generate novel, high quality
data has allowed her and her colleagues to overturn previous assumptions or
hypotheses about a variety of igneous processes, giving us a better
understanding of mafic volcanism over the last 3.8 billion years of Earth
history.
Upon the completion of her PhD on the
nature of Eoarchean rocks (Jenner et al., 2009; Jenner et al., 2013), Dr. Jenner immediately branched out into a new field of study,
namely the quantification of “less commonly analyzed elements” in volcanic
glasses. One such element is selenium.
In theory, selenium should be a useful proxy for sulfur in systems (such
as volcanic glasses) which may have undergone partial degassing, but in
practice, there was no standard analytical protocol for measuring this low
abundance chalcogenide in silicate materials.
Using the electron microprobe, laser ablation inductively coupled mass
spectrometry (LA-ICPMS), and the Sensitive high-resolution ion microprobe
(SHRIMP), Dr. Jenner characterized a suite of commonly used reference materials
(Jenner et al., 2009). This
study remains the only case where the SHRIMP has been used as a negative ion
trace element quantification tool.
However, despite developing this novel SIMS technique, she and her colleagues
used the SIMS data to devise an analytical protocol to routinely measure selenium
using LA-ICPMS. The use of the cheaper, more versatile LA-ICPMS equipment meant
that selenium contents of target glasses and minerals could be determined along
with other elements of interest in a wholescale manner much more economically
than the use of the SHRIMP would allow.
While an analytical specialist may have
been content to run this application without too much thought to the geologic implications,
Dr. Jenner and her colleagues immediately put it to use in investigating the
enrichment of Cu, Ag, and Au in arc-related magmas. Their “magnetite crisis” paper (Jenner et al., 2010) uses
this selenium analytical technique to generate compelling data relating to the
trends of these elements with magma evolution. This dispels the earlier, intellectually
unsatisfying notion of a fugitive fluid or vapor phase, clearly showing that
magnetite crystallization triggers sulfide saturation by changing the magmatic
fO2.
The use of more, higher quality data to
reject a long held but data-poor assumption is a hallmark of Dr. Jenner’s
research. Although she has continued to
analyze selenium for the purpose of constraining sulfide saturation and
chalcogenide behavior (Jenner et al., 2012; Patten et al., 2013), her next major achievement was to roll out the same approach to
the rest of the periodic table, and a wider variety of sea floor volcanic glasses.
Jenner and O’Neill (2012b) is a primer
for how to analyze most of the periodic table in mafic glasses, with
corrections for interfered elements and methods for how to minimize analytical
difficulties. While the analysis of
volcanic glasses by LA-ICPMS is not new, this study is remarkable in its
thorough examination of issues of normalization and reproducibility which have
not necessarily been presented in a single unified study before.
Jenner and O’Neill (2012a) then
apply these techniques to hundreds of ocean floor volcanic glasses, yielding a
rich, high quality dataset that allows them to realize (O’Neill and Jenner, 2012) that the mid-ocean ridge fractional crystallization model that we
were all taught as undergraduates decades ago cannot explain their new, higher
quality data, and needs refinement.
Once again, Dr. Jenner and her colleagues
develop new tools illuminate a previously underconstrained system, yielding a
novel explanation with greater predictive power. This changes the way we think
about the main type of magma generation on Earth.
There are quite a few talented young
geoscientists who develop new analytical techniques. And many of them apply them to known areas of
scientific debate, to build up or tear down evidence for one or more prevailing
hypotheses. But Dr. Jenner is unusual in
having both the analytical skills to devise new approaches and the intellectual
agility to find entirely new geological interpretations, which were not even
part of the debate before her studies were carried out.
And although Dr. Jenner is very much an
analytical geochemist, it is her ability to find the natural rocks to use her
procedures on which underpins her success.
While she collaborates extensively with experimental petrologists, she
mostly analyses natural samples of diverse provenance. Working from the Greenland Eoarchean to
modern submarine volcanics, her areas of study span more than 95% of the
terrestrial rock record in geologic time.
Her onshore field areas range from the periglacial west coast of Greenland
to tropical Samoa. While ocean drilling programs do not fit the
stereotypical mold of outcrop hammering and rock licking, they are
none-the-less the only way we currently have of accessing the ~70% of our
planet’s surface that is under water. And it is her ability to choose the right
sample or samples for her new analytical methods which allows her to discover
novel petrologic processes.
Finally, it is worth noting that in a
competitive field like academic geology, there is an element of luck which is
often a contributor to success. Whether
it is happening on just the right rock, or simply having jobs appear in a manner
that allows a stable, productive workflow, simple good fortune can often be the
difference between a discovery and a confirmation. Dr. Jenner has had, by far,
the worst luck of anyone I know with an advanced geology degree.
I have worked in industry and government
for the past seven years, so I know many of the situations which result in a
person leaking out of the academic pipeline.
Dr. Jenner has experienced a large number of these “career-terminal”
events. But unlike the rest of us, she
has forced her way back into the pipeline with a combination of intellectual
firepower, gritty determination, and the most dedicated work eithic of anyone I
have met in any field. This has allowed her to not just stay employed, but
maintain control of her career trajectory, despite her three postdocs and her
faculty job being on four different continents.
And despite her hardships, she is one of the most enthusiastic, positive,
energetic scientists I know. This, as
much as her academic record, makes her a role model for all young scientists. Frances
Jenner would be an inspirational choice for the GSA committee as the inaugural
MGPV division Early Career scientist.
References:
Jenner, F.E., Arculus, R.J., Mavrogenes, J.A., Dyriw, N.J., Nebel,
O., and Hauri, E.H., 2012, Chalcophile element systematics in volcanic glasses
from the northwestern Lau Basin: Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, v. 13,
no. 6, p. Q06014.
Jenner, F.E., Bennett, V.C., Nutman,
A.P., Friend, C.R.L., Norman, M.D., and Yaxley, G., 2009, Evidence for
subduction at 3.8 Ga: Geochemistry of arc-like metabasalts from the southern
edge of the Isua Supracrustal Belt: Chemical Geology, v. 261, no. 1-2, p.
83–98.
Jenner, F.E., Bennett, V.C., Yaxley, G.,
Friend, C.R.L., and Nebel, O., 2013, Eoarchean within-plate basalts from
southwest Greenland: Geology, v. 41, no. 3, p. 327–330.
Jenner, F.E., Holden, P., Mavrogenes,
J.A., O’Neill, H.S.C., and Allen, C., 2009, Determination of Selenium
Concentrations in NIST SRM 610, 612, 614 and Geological Glass Reference
Materials Using the Electron Probe, LA-ICP-MS and SHRIMP II: Geostandards and
Geoanalytical Research, v. 33, no. 3, p. 309–317.
Jenner, F.E., and O’Neill, H.S.C., 2012a,
Analysis of 60 elements in 616 ocean floor basaltic glasses: Geochemistry,
Geophysics, Geosystems, v. 13, no. 2, p. Q02005.
Jenner, F.E., and O’Neill, H.S.C.,
2012b, Major and trace analysis of basaltic glasses by laser-ablation ICP-MS:
Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, v. 13, no. 3, p. Q03003.
Jenner, F.E., O’Neill, H.S.C., Arculus,
R.J., and Mavrogenes, J.A., 2010, The Magnetite Crisis in the Evolution of
Arc-related Magmas and the Initial Concentration of Au, Ag and Cu: Journal of
Petrology, v. 51, no. 12, p. 2445–2464.
O’Neill, H.S.C., and Jenner, F.E., 2012,
The global pattern of trace-element distributions in ocean floor basalts:
Nature, v. 491, no. 7426, p. 698–704.
Patten, C., Barnes, S.-J., Mathez, E.A.,
and Jenner, F.E., 2013, Partition coefficients of chalcophile elements between
sulfide and silicate melts and the early crystallization history of sulfide
liquid: LA-ICP-MS analysis of MORB sulfide droplets: Chemical Geology, v. 358,
p. 170–188.
