Roberta L. Rudnick

Early life and education Rudnick grew up in Portland, Oregon. She completed her undergraduate studies in earth sciences at Portland State University in 1980. She was only fifty miles from the eruption of Mount St. Helens. She worked on the geochemistry of metamorphic rocks in Van Horn, Texas. Her master's thesis was titled the Petrography, Geochemistry and Tectonic Affinities of Meta-Igneous Rocks from the Precambrian Carrizo Mountain Group. In 1988, Rudnick earned her PhD at the Australian National University. Her supervisor, Stuart Ross Taylor, studied the upper continental crust. Whilst she was a student she used the Sensitive high-resolution ion microprobe (SHRIMP) to date ancient zircons. She identified that granulites were depleted in soluble elements.

Research and career Rudnick was appointed a von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in 1987. In 1994 Rudnick joined Harvard University as assistant professor, before being promoted to Associate in 1997. It explored the andesitic composition of continental crust that cannot be produced by basaltic magmatism - the building blocks of the continental crust do not match the edifice. She used lithium isotopes to explore the influence of weathering on the composition of the continental crust. Lithium isotopes allowed her to trace recycling in crusts and other diffusional processes in earth. She demonstrated that reactive transport causes kinetic isotope fractionation. She studied ancient glacial tills and demonstrated that ancient continents were rich in iron and magnesium. She also worked on geoneutrinos, helping physicists at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and USArray identify whether neutrinos come from the core, mantle or crust of earth. In 2012 she was made Department Chair. There she continued work on using isotope fractionation to understand how chemical weathering of the continental crust has evolved alongside changing atmospheric chemistry. She is working on the concentration of heat producing elements (potassium, thorium and uranium) in the continental crust to estimate the Moho temperature.

Awards and honors Rudnick is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Other awards include:

2005 - Fellow of the American Geophysical Union 2006 - N. L. Bowen award of the American Geophysical Union 2010 - Member of the National Academy of Sciences 2012 - Dana Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America 2017 - Harry H. Hess Medal of the American Geophysical Union 2023* - V.M. Goldschmidt Medal of the Geochemical Society