Each year, EGU honours individuals for their significant contributions to the Earth, planetary, and space sciences by bestowing more than 50 medals and awards during its spring General Assembly. EGU members are asked to submit their nominations for all EGU 2023 honours.

On this year’s International Women’s Day we are launching the call for nominations for the 2023 honours. In addition, EGU’s President Helen Glaves, is announcing some changes in the way we collect data about our awards and medals. “The geosciences has an ongoing problem with lack of diversity – often highlighted by the groups of people who are under-represented in the EGU honours system,” she comments. “To help us better understand this trend in our awards and medals, we are collecting some additional information about the nominations through some new questions in the nomination forms. This extra information is being collected as part of an on-going process to re-examine our awards and medals, with the aim of ensuring they fit the needs of and better reflect our membership as a forward-looking community, committed to recognising scientific excellence.”

These initial changes will build on data collected on previous years where the gender of nominees and awardees was inferred from names, but now this data will be specifically requested, as well as information about the career stage of both the nominee and nominator, and their geographic locations. EGU has collected data on the inferred gender of nominees and awardees since 2014, in both our Early Career Scientist (ECS) and Division/Union categories. Thomas Blunier, Chair of the Awards Committee explains, “by collating this data we were able to clearly see when we were not achieving good gender representation. With a concerted effort we managed to increase the proportion of female awardees to 64% in the ECS categories in 2021, and 38% in the Division and Union awards; an all-time high for both categories. By officially collecting this data we hope to continue to improve gender representation, whilst also, for the first time, collecting data to help us address geographical representation.” A complete summary of all the 2021 awardee data is available at the end of this announcement.

To help us increase diversity among EGU awardees and medallists, EGU encourages members to consider gender, geographical, and cultural balance when nominating outstanding Earth, planetary, and space scientists at various career stages. “I would really like to encourage our members to submit nominations; the procedure is quite straightforward,” Blunier says. “I also hope you’ll consider nominations of persons who may have been previously overlooked,” he adds. “The sole evaluation criterion is scientific excellence.”

Detailed information on the selection process and how to propose a candidate is available on the Awards & Medals section of the EGU website. Nominations for all medals and awards must be submitted via an online nomination form by 15 June 2022, about two weeks after the General Assembly.

The list of awards and medals bestowed by the Union and its divisions, and the names of the previous awardees, are available on the EGU website. The 2023 awards and medals, which will be announced in October 2022, will be presented to their recipients at the EGU General Assembly 2023.

• EGU Awards & Medals
• Proposal & selection of candidates
• Nominations page