Presentation of the Mineralogical Society of America Award for 2009

Abstract

Madam President, Officers, and Councilors of MSA, Members and Fellows of the Mineralogical Society of America and the Geological Society of America, Ladies, and Gentlemen, it is a great pleasure for me to present my former Ph.D. student, Thomas Patrick Trainor, to receive the 2009 MSA Award. Tom’s work at Stanford University as a graduate student, at GSECARS (University of Chicago) as a post-doctoral fellow, and in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, as a young faculty member has led to a new understanding of mineral surfaces and their interactions with aqueous environments. I nominated Tom for this prestigious award because of his groundbreaking contributions to the emerging field of mineral surface geochemistry, including first-of-their-kind non-specular crystal truncation rod (CTR) diffraction studies of hydrated mineral surfaces, which provided us with the first three-dimensional structures of environmentally important mineral surfaces on which many important chemical reactions in the environment occur. The results of these studies have led to fundamental understanding of the differences in chemical reactivity of different crystallographic surfaces of the same phase as well as the same crystallographic surfaces on isomorphous phases. Such reactions have a profound influence on many important mineralogical processes including crystal growth and dissolution, incorporation of trace elements in minerals grown from aqueous solutions, and sorption reactions that can effectively sequester aqueous contaminants and pollutants on mineral surfaces. Tom’s undergraduate studies were at the Colorado School of Mines, where he majored in chemistry with a minor in environmental science and engineering. Tom also earned an A.S. degree in Aviation Science from the University of New Haven in 1992 and was instrument rated. Tom spent summers in 1992, 1993, and 1994 working for the U.S Forest Service and five months in 1994 working for the U.S. Geological Survey during which …