ETH Zurich awards honorary doctorate to Susan Trumbore

Susan Trumbore studied geology at the University of Delaware and received her doctorate in geochemistry from Columbia University in 1989. During her doctoral thesis, she discovered the potential of radiocarbon as an important indicator of the carbon cycle. New instrumental methods enabled her to make particularly precise measurements. After postdoctoral fellowships at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the USA and at the Laboratory for Ion Beam Physics at ETH Zurich, Professor Trumbore accepted a position at the University of California, Irvine, in 1991. In 2009, she was appointed Director of the Max Planck Institute in Jena.

For more than 35 years, Susan Trumbore has pioneered the use of radiocarbon to understand how terrestrial ecosystems respond to natural and human-induced changes in the Earth's carbon cycle. She is also investigating how quickly and in what form these changes occur. Her methods and ideas have strongly influenced our understanding of the entire Earth system.

Professor Trumbore has received numerous awards for her achievements, including the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Earth and Environmental Sciences, the Marsh Award for Earth and Environmental Sciences from the British Ecological Society and the International Balzan Prize for Earth System Dynamics.