Heather Marie Stoll

The 2025 Hans Oeschger Medal is awarded to Heather Marie Stoll for pioneering contributions in both marine and terrestrial palaeoclimate research, which led to groundbreaking advancement in our understanding of rapid climate change, through forcings and feedbacks.

Heather Marie Stoll is a world-leading scientist in the field of palaeoclimate reconstructions and she has made major contributions to both the marine and terrestrial palaeoclimate communities for her work on climate reconstructions using inorganic and organic geochemistry in carbonate archives. She contributed to the field of climate science mainly with her work on marine algae, coccolithophores and diatoms, and their adaptive responses to changing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. These results had widespread impact in the field of palaeoclimatology, and were crucial in solving a long-standing puzzle of apparent temperature-carbon dioxide concentration decoupling during the Miocene. She provided a significant contribution to our understanding of the feedbacks between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and climate during warm periods, and thus crucial insights for future climate change scenarios. Moreover, Stoll’s contribution to the field of terrestrial palaeoclimate research is mainly her work on cave deposits. She provided validation of the meaning of oxygen isotope records in speleothems by calibrating them to independently constrained marine records. This pioneering approach allowed her to directly link freshening of the North Atlantic during de-glaciations to changes in regional atmospheric temperatures over the last two glacial terminations. Stoll is also a productive scholar who supervised and mentored many students and postdocs from different backgrounds and cultures including in three languages across three countries. She is known as a supportive, collegial and engaged mentor and is an outstanding, creative, and inspiring scientist.