Lamont-Doherty Director Awarded National Medal of Science
On October 3, 2014, it was announced that Sean Solomon, director of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, will receive the National Medal of Science at a White House ceremony later this year. The medal was created in 1959 and is administered for the White House by the National Science Foundation. Awarded annually, it recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to science and engineering.
As head of NASA's MESSENGER mission to Mercury, Solomon has led the most comprehensive investigation yet of the closest planet to the Sun. Some of his other projects are household names in space science: the Magellan mission to Venus, the Mars Global Surveyor mission and the GRAIL mission to the Moon, which launched in 2011 and has mapped the Moon's gravitational field in unprecedented detail.
Solomon became director of Lamont-Doherty in 2012 after serving for nearly two decades as director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C. After finishing his Ph.D. in geophysics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971, he stayed on to teach and conduct research there for two decades. In 1978, he published a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that explained how relatively small bodies like the moon and Mercury evolved without the multiple tectonic plates found on Earth. This "one-plate planet" idea still holds in understanding the tectonics of the solar system's rocky inner planets. Solomon moved to Carnegie in 1992. Among other roles, he served as principal investigator for Carnegie's part of the NASA Astrobioogy Institute, which seeks to understand the origin of life on earth, and its potential to exist elsewhere.