Ammodo KNAW Award for Dr Arwen Deuss

Dr Arwen Deuss has been given the Ammodo KNAW Award for Natural Sciences.

Dr Deuss is an earth scientist whose work combines seismology, mineralogy and geochemistry. Her career has been focussed on studying the centre of our planet by collecting data from earthquakes. Before she had even obtained her PhD, she had become the first person in the world to capture seismic vibrations that went through the very core of the earth. This allowed her to suggest that within the earth’s liquid core is a thick metal sphere about the size of the moon.

Her subsequent work has concentrated on this core, which she refers to as the ‘little planet within our own planet’. The Ammodo KNAW Award will help her continue exploring the question: what can we, standing on the earth’s surface, discover about its core?

The Ammodo KNAW Awards, which are being presented this year for the first time, are given by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Ammodo Foundation. They hope to encourage fundamental scientific research in the Netherlands by annually giving eight researchers a cash prize of EUR 300,000. Dr Deuss has also recently received an ERC New Investigators Grant and several awards, including the Murchison Fund from the Geological Society of London.

Dr Deuss is a Fellow of Pembroke College and Associate Professor of Seismology at Utrecht University. For more information, see the Ammodo KNAW Award website or her departmental web page.