Two NAI Recipients of 2015 Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) Awards
[Source: Divison of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society

Geronimo Villanueva of the NAICAN 7 NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center team received the Harold C. Urey Prize, which recognizes early career scientists who have made outstanding achievements in planetary science. His work has ranged from instrument design to spectroscopy to observational astronomy to programming and data analysis. Villanueva’s areas of research have included observing and charting the atmosphere of Mars and analyzing and modeling comets. He specializes in the search for organic molecules.

Yuk Yung of the NAICAN 6 Virtual Planetary Laboratory at the University of Washington was honored with the Gerard P. Kuiper Prize. The award is given to those who have made outstanding contributions to planetary science. Yung is known for forwarding atmospheric photochemistry, global habitability and climate change, radiative transfer, and atmospheric evolution. Considered a founding father of planetary atmospheric chemistry, his models have been applied to results from numerous spacecraft missions including Vikings, Cassini and New Horizons.

More on the DPS awards can be found at http://dps.aas.org/prizes/2015.

Andrew Knoll Honored by Royal Society
[Source: The Royal Society

Andrew Knoll of the NAICAN 6 MIT team was elected to be a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) for excellence in science. Only a few new members are selected by the Royal Society Fellows each year. Knoll received the honor in part for his research in the evolution of Earth’s surface environment in relation to the evolution of life, for pioneering the use of isotopic chemostratigraphy, and for helping to establish the Ediacaran Period, among many other achievements.

The announcement of the ForMemRS appointment is available at
https://royalsociety.org/people/fellowship/2015/andrew-knoll/.