2020 – Georges Calas
Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences, University Pierre & Marie Curie-Paris VI (now Sorbonne Université) and a senior member of the University Institute of France.
George Calas has been a pioneer in the use of solid-state spectroscopy to understand the relationships between the properties of minerals and glasses and their structure at the atomic scale. His extensive work on glasses, and the determination of the unusual coordination of some elements, has served as the basis to understand structure-property relationships in glasses. His pioneering work on the role of element speciation in determining the concentration of transition elements and contaminants in the surficial environment is of critical importance to our understanding of the dispersal of toxic ions at the surface of the Earth, and to the development of remediation technologies.
Read the articles in Elements