Jardetzky Lecturer

The Jardetzky lecture in geophysics honors the late Wenceslas S. Jardetzky, a renowned researcher and educator whose flourishing scientific career in Europe was halted by World War II and revived after he emigrated to the United States. From 1949 until his death in 1962, he was a research associate at Lamont-Doherty, where he collaborated with Frank Press, former president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Maurice Ewing, Lamont- Doherty's founder, on a well-known and widely used scientific book, Wave Propagation in Layered Media.

Dr. Jardetzky's broad scope of scientific interests also included celestial mechanics, fluid dynamics, theoretical physics, seismology and the migration of the poles. A principal contribution to science was his mathematical theory on zonal rotation, which provided a mechanism for the migration of continents.

The Jardetzky lecture was established in 1992 by Dr. Jardetzky's son Oleg, who is the founder of the Magnetic Resonance Laboratory and professor of molecular pharmacology at Stanford University. In endowing the lectureship, Dr. Jardetzky said he hoped it would "help enrich the outstanding tradition of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which provided a much cherished intellectual home to my father after he emigrated to this country."

Past Lectures:

2009 LECTURE

Date: October 2, 2009
Awardee: Sallie W. Chisholm, MIT
Title: “Too Small to See, Too Big to
Ignore: What Prochlorococcus
Has Taught Me About Life and
the Ocean”

2008 LECTURE

Date: May 16, 2008
Awardee: Donald Forsyth, Brown University
Title: “Seismological Observations of Small-Scale Convection in the Mantle from the East Pacific Rise to California.

2007 LECTURE

Date: May 11, 2007
Awardee: Inez Fung, University of California, Berkeley
Title: Changing Carbon Cycle and Accelerating Climate Change.

2006 LECTURE

Date: September 22, 2006
Awardee: Barbara Romanowicz, University of California, Berkeley
Title: The Origin of the Earth's "hum": Bridging The Gap Between Seismology And Oceanography.

2005 LECTURE

Date: May 12, 2005

Awardee: Nicolas Gruber, University of California, Los Angeles
Title: Recent Insights IntoThe Anthropogenic Perturbation of the Global Carbon Cycle

2003 LECTURE
Date: Sept 5th, 2003

Awardee: Alan Levander, Rice University, Houston TX
Title: Imag(in)ing The Continental Lithosphere

2002 LECTURE
Date: Feb 2, 2002
Awardee: David Karl, University of Hawaii
Title: A Sea Of Change: Decade - Scale Biogeochemical Variability In The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre

2000 LECTURE
Date: Nov 3, 2000
Awardee: Veerabhadran Ramanathan, University of California, San Diego
Title: A Climate: Do We Really Understand How We are Changing it?

1999 LECTURE
Date: Nov 18, 1999
Awardee: John Delaney, University of Washington
Title: Submarine Research In The 21st Century: A Fiber Optic Telescope To Inner Space

1998 LECTURE
Date: Mar 30, 1998
Awardee: Peter Raven, Director, Missouri Botanical Gardens
Title: Biogeography, Biodiversity and Human Futures

1996 LECTURE
Date: Nov 18, 1996
Awardee: Nick Shackleton, Godwin Laboratory, University of Cambridge
Title: Climate Cyclicity On Geological Timescales

1995 LECTURE
Date: Nov 16, 1995
Awardee: Dan McKenzie, Bullard Laboratories, University of Cambridge
Title: Thirty Years As A Geophysicist, Or Why We Now All Have To Become Geochemists

1994 LECTURE
Date: Nov 17, 1994
Awardee: Sean Solomon, Director, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution
Title: The Geophysical Evolution Of Venue: Why Does Earth's Sister Planet Bear So Llittle Family Resemblance?

1993 LECTURE
Date: Sep 24, 1993
Awardee: Ted Irving, University of Victoria
Title: Rhododendrons, Plate Tectonics And Global Climate Change

1992 LECTURE
Date: Dec 1, 1992
Awardee: Frank Press, President, National Academy of Sciences
Title: Can Scientists Provide Credible Advice In Washington?