Abstract
Fellow mineralogists, I am honored to introduce Karim Benzerara of the IMPMC (Institut de Mineralogie et de Physique des Milieux Condenses), University of Paris 6–7, as the 2012 MSA Award winner. Karim is receiving this award for his exceptional contributions to our understanding of mineral-microbe interactions and biomineralization. He has accomplished this using a combination of transmission electron microscopy, synchrotron-based scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM), the application of which Karim has pioneered in the Earth Sciences, and an uncanny knack for choosing important geobiology problems that require nanoscale solutions. Karim completed his Ph.D. degree at the University of Paris 7 working with Francois Guyot, a mineral physicist at Paris 7 who transformed himself into a geomicrobiologist, Thierry Heulin, a molecular microbial ecologist at the French Atomic Energy Commission, and Philippe Gillet, a geochemist who was then at the University of Lyon. A fragment of a martian achondrite meteorite fell in the Tatahouine Desert in southern Tunisia in 1931. If you don’t remember the Tatahouine Desert, it played a prominent role in Star Wars II. Fragments from this same fall were collected again in 1994, which allowed a comparison …
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