Janne Blichert-Toft awarded the Steno Medal

It is with great pleasure that the Danish Geological Society awards the Steno Medal to Janne Blichert-Toft the 24th of April 2015. Janne is educated in Copenhagen and is today Director of Research at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon.

The Danish Geological Society awards the medal to foreigners, and in special cases Danes, who have made significant contributions to Geoscience.

And Janne has done just that. Her research focus is high-temperature geochemistry, especially radiogenic isotopes and she has made invaluable contributions to the disciplines of igneous petrology, geochronology, Cosmochemistry, the evolution of the mantle and crust, early Earth geodynamics and the origin of the terrestrial planets. She is perhaps best known in the geochemical community for playing a fundamental role in establishing chemical separation and analytical techniques for determining Lu-Hf isotope compositions in rocks and minerals by mass spectrometry. The method has since been applied by Janne and others to greatly further our understanding of Earth’s geochemical evolution, in particular towards unravelling the early history of the Earth and the Solar System.