2017 Dwornik Award

The Dwornik Award was endowed by Stephen E. Dwornik in 1991 to encourage students in the field of planetary science. The Dwornik Award originally acknowledged the best oral presentation at both LPSC and GSA, with the winners traveling to Washington, DC, to accept their award. Due to the overwhelming number of planetary-related presentations at LPSC relative to GSA, the award later became a LPSC-only competition but expanded to include honorable mentions and poster presentations. A brief biography of Stephen Dwornik’s influential career can be found on the Dwornik Award webpage:  http://rock.geosociety.org/pgd/dwornik.html.

The 2017 Dwornik winners are:

Best Graduate Oral Presentation:  R. Terik Daly, Brown University, “Projectile preservation during oblique hypervelocity impacts”

 Honorable Mention — Graduate Oral:  Kevin M. Cannon, Brown University, “Primordial clays on Mars formed beneath a steam or supercritical atmosphere”

 Graduate Poster:  Tess E. Caswell, Brown University, “Grain size evolution in icy satellites: New experimental constraints”

 Honorable Mention — Graduate Poster:  Hannah H. Kaplan, Brown University, “Reflectance spectrosocopy of meteorite insoluble organic matter (IOM)”

 Undergraduate Oral:  Allison M. McGraw, University of Arizona, “Do L-chondrites come from the Gefion asteroid family?”

 Honorable Mention — Undergraduate Oral:  Carol B. Hundal, Wellesley College, “Chronology of fresh rayed craters in Elysium Planitia, Mars”

 Undergraduate Poster:  Emma S. Sosa, “Constraining the petrogenesis of the paired achondrites GRA 06128/9 through partial melting of an oxidized chondrite”

 Honorable Mention — Undergraduate Poster:  Isabel R. King, Harvey Mudd College, “Evolution of circular polarization ratio (CPR) profiles of kilometer-scale craters on the lunar maria”

 2017 Pellas-Ryder Award

The Pellas-Ryder award is given to the Planetary Science Best Student Paper published during the preceding year. The award is jointly given by the Meteoritical Society and the Planetary Geology Division of the Geological Society of America and includes a $500 award from the Meteoritical Society and a plaque awarded by the PGD. This year’s Pellas-Ryder award was jointly awarded to Gerrit Budde of Wilhelms- Universität Münster Germany and James Keane of the University of Arizona.

Budde’s paper was “Tungsten isotopic constraints on the age and origin of chondrules” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, 2886–2891.

Keane’s paper was “Reorientation and faulting of Pluto due to volatile loading within Sputnik Planitia” in Nature, 540(7631), 90–93.

Congratulations to all these winners!