Jill Banfield to Receive Franklin Medal and L’Oréal-UNESCO Award

Summary

DOE-funded scientist Jillian F. Banfield, a University of California, Berkeley, biogeochemist and geomicrobiologist, will receive two prestigious awards – the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science and the L’Oréal-UNESCO ‘For Women in Science’ award – for her groundbreaking work on how microbes alter rocks and interact with the natural world. She has used cutting-edge techniques to sequence the genomes of the different species of bacteria and to catalogue the proteins they produce, fully characterizing this unique microbial ecosystem. Banfield has been at UC Berkeley since 2001, where she is a professor of earth and planetary science, of environmental science, policy and management, and of materials science and engineering, and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is one of seven recipients of the 2011 Franklin Medal, presented every year to “preeminent trailblazers in science, business and technology.” Banfield is one of five recipients of the 2011 For Women in Science awards from the L’Oréal Foundation and United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The awards ceremony will take place on March 3, 2011, at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Each laureate will receive $100,000 in recognition of her contributions to science.