Iris van Zelst

GD Geodynamics

The 2025 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Iris van Zelst for a profound impact on the geodynamics community through outstanding scientific contributions, inspiring leadership, enthusiastic outreach, and fostering an inclusive and diverse work environment.

The 2025 Geodynamics Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Iris van Zelst for a range of excellent contributions to the geodynamics community.

The groundbreaking work of van Zelst has opened new avenues for studying tsunamigenic earthquakes, by traversing the timescales of subduction dynamics and the seismic cycle (hundreds to millions of years) and dynamic earthquake rupture (seconds and below) and showing that multiple faults can be activated during a single earthquake.

van Zelst has a unique ability to master and connect new research fields, forging interdisciplinary collaborations with far-reaching impact. By interfacing geosciences, planetary science, and astronomy, she investigates links between planetary interiors and atmospheres as part of ESA’s EnVision and PLATO mission consortia. Leading a team of international experts in seismology, geology, and geodynamics funded by ISSI, she estimated Venus’ global potential seismicity and assessed the detection capabilities of different instruments for a future geophysical mission to Venus.

Through outreach efforts like her engaging Science Sisters videos, sessions and meetings she organises, and from her wide range of co-authors, van Zelst shows the remarkable drive for connecting people and promoting equity and diversity in geodynamics and beyond. As founder of the EGU Geodynamics Blog, she assembled a diverse team that created more than 100 blog posts per year. As editorial lead of the Diamond Open Access journal Geodynamica, she will remove financial barriers to peer-reviewed publishing.

van Zelst has a clear passion for sharing science, which shows in her media appearances and as a founder of the very popular EGU Geodynamics 101 short courses that she expanded into an open-access educational review paper with >10,000 views. Her card game QUARTETnary hit its crowdfunding target in 12 hours, raising funds to inspire the next generation of geoscientists.

All of these achievements make Iris van Zelst a very worthy recipient of the Geodynamics Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist award.