T-section officers and the Section Fellows/Leadership Committee encourage nominations of deserving T-section members for Fellowship in AGU and for appropriate AGU medals. We are especially interested in ensuring that worthy women and non-US candidates are identified by the nomination process. If you know of a worthy candidate, please consider nominating him or her.

Deadlines for nominations for medals is October 1, 2001. The complete call for nominations is available at http://www.agu.org/inside/awardnom.html. To see a list of past T-section AGU medalists, click here.

The deadline for nominations for Fellowship is October 1, 2001. The complete call for nominations is available at http://www.agu.org/inside/fellnom.html. To see a list of past T-section AGU fellows, click here.

To help you prepare an effective nomination, Harry Green, chair of the Tectonophysics Fellows Committee, has provided the following suggestions.
 
 

Dear Colleagues:

There is a fundamental disconnect in the ways we nominate our distinguished colleagues for fellowship in the Union and for the major prizes of the Union. Because nomination is completely voluntary, it tends to be something we think about only when the awards are announced and then we say - "I should have nominated ... for that". We then promptly forget again.

For those of you who feel ready to make such nominations and to solicit the requisite support letters, I hereby earnestly request that you do so.

For the rest, however, I would like to break the disconnect by offering to help make things go. If you think that a particular person is worthy of fellowship or a medal but do not feel that you are the appropriate person to make the nomination, please send me an email (hgreen@ucrac1.ucr.edu) suggesting the nominee and one or more members of AGU who you believe would be appropriate nominators. I will pass on your suggestion to those members and urge them to consider making such a nomination. I cannot guarantee nomination in this process, but my experience with such suggested nominations has been very positive.

For the nomination process itself, you want to make a clear case as to why your nominee is deserving for consideration by the Section to which you are writing. If the nominee bridges more than one discipline, you want to be explicit about that and to suggest joint consideration by more than one section. Support letters are all important. You want them to be numerous, strong, specific, and from as wide a spectrum of the Section(s) as possible. Letter writers who are already fellows of the Union probably carry more weight than those who are not, but never leave out a writer for that reason. In addition to scientific accomplishments, don't forget to include contributions through instrument development and mentoring of students and/or young geophysicists. Don't overlook the many members of our Union who reside outside of the USA; AGU has truly become the International Geophysical Union. It will remain so only if we demonstrate in multiple ways that we are not provincial in our reward system. Lastly, look hard for the women and men who are emerging as stars; don't confine yourselves to the elder statesmen/women. This last caution is particularly important for the major medals of our society. AGU policy frowns on multiple medals for individuals; a completely separate justification must be put forward to qualify one for a second major medal.

-- Harry Green, Chair, Tectonophysics Fellows Committee

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