Harrison receives 2006 William Gilbert Award

Abstract

Richard J. Harrison received the William Gilbert Award at the 2006 AGU Fall Meeting. The award recognizes outstanding and unselfish work in magnetism of Earth materials and of the Earth and planets.This year the Gilbert Award is given to an outstanding young scientist under the age of 35. Richard Harrison easily fulfills the first criterion and just makes the second. He is now 34. As I reviewed Richard's accomplishments, I was once again impressed with his scope and level of research. He has 50 papers published, or in press, and all of them are of the same high scientific caliber. Many of you know Richard's cutting‐edge research with electron holography showing magnetic interactions across magnetite‐ulvospinel intergrowths, and are familiar with his groundbreaking research on lamellar magnetism. His TEM observations, combined with extensive Monte Carlo simulations of atomic interactions in hematite‐ilmenite interfaces, which took both electrostatic and magnetic interactions into consideration, have developed the idea of contact layers as a magnetic substructure of defect moments at the interfaces. This was followed by work that showed that contact layers reduce charge imbalance at the interfaces.