Past Nevada Medal Winners

Sunday, March 5, 2006 | 7:48 a.m.

Past winners of the Desert Research Institute's annual Nevada Medal and their field of expertise, as provided by DRI:

2005 - Donald Grayson, anthropology professor at the University of Washington; best known for research suggesting climate change - not pre-settlement hunters - drove the extinction of wooly mammoths and other large mammals in North America 10,000 years ago.

2004 - Farouk El-Baz, research professor and director, Center for Remote Sensing Boston University; pioneered environmental remote sensing with satellites and the understanding of the origin and evolution of desert land forms.

2003 - Charles Goldman, professor of limnology, director of Tahoe Research Group, University of California, Davis; pioneering research into factors that affect the clarity of the world's freshwater lakes, including Lake Tahoe.

2002 - M. Gordon "Reds" Wolman, professor of geography and environmental engineering, Johns Hopkins University; one of first to fully integrate environmental perspectives on issues of land use, water quality and the natural processes that shape the Earth's surface.

2001 - John H. Seinfeld, former dean of the California Institute of Technology's Division of Engineering and Applied Science; created the first computer model that could incorporate complex variables contributing to air quality conditions.

2000 - Harold Mooney, professor of environmental biology of Stanford; pioneering role in developing the field of plant physiological ecology.

1999 - Wallace Broecker, professor of geology at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; tied variations in the global transport of heat energy by great ocean currents to abrupt shifts of the Earth's climate in the past.

1998 - Lynn Margulis, professor of microbiology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; research on the evolution of the small forms of life, including the role of bacteria in influencing and regulating biological processes and environmental conditions.

1997 - F. Sherwood Rowland, professor of chemistry, University of California, Irvine; atmospheric chemist whose 1974 discovery that CFCs were depleting the earth's protective ozone layer prompted adoption of the Montreal Protocol to ban production of these substances.

1996 - Hector F. DeLuca, Harry Steenbock research professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison; pre-eminent authority of the modern era of vitamin D research.

1995 - Charles Elachi, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Cal-Tech; scientific leader in the development of technologies that provide exceptional environmental and geologic information about the earth and other planets and moons in the solar system.

1994 - John N. Bahcall, Inst. for Advances Studies, Princeton, N.J.; astrophysicist who shepherded the Hubble Space Telescope project for more than two decades, and contributed fundamental advances in the understanding of neutrinos emitted from the core of stars.

1993 - Margaret Bryan Davis, University of Minnesota; paleoecologist whose innovative analytical approach overturned scientific assumptions about how environments respond to climate change.

1992 - Carl Djerassi, Stanford University; major advances in understanding of hormones in animal biochemistry and developed the chemical base for the first oral contraceptive.

1991 - Benoit Mandelbrot, Watkins research Center, IBM; introduced fractal geometry and "The Mandelbrot Set" to art, mathematics and science.

1990 - James A. Van Allen, University of Iowa; discoverer of the "Van Allen Radiation Belt" surrounding the Earth and a pioneer in the use of unmanned probes for space exploration.

1989 - Dwight Billings, Duke University; former Nevada professor regarded the "father" of plant physiological ecology that is now a guiding principle for the study of ecological systems.

1988 - Verner Suomi, University of Wisconsin; developer of the "spin-scan" weather camera that provided the first satellite photos for TV weather.