Congratulations to Denise Hills, Deborah Khider and Emma Aronson who received Earthcube community awards during the 2022 Earthcube Annual Meeting in La jolla.
The EarthCube Legacy Award recognizes community members who have been foundational to advancing and shaping EarthCube’s development. This award is a way to recognize outstanding leaders who have made a significant and long term lasting impact on EarthCube. Denise Hills is the recipient of the 2022 EarthCube Legacy award. Hills has been an integral part of EarthCube's community since early on. Her participation in the Engagement and Science committees, and in the Leadership team, over the history of EarthCube should be recognized. She helped craft the Code of Conduct, and played an important role in supporting the Annual Meetings, outreach and engagement for EarthCube. Denise is a big reason why I continued with EC. She helped to build a community that was welcoming and open and has helped laid the groundwork for the careers of many individuals through her work.
Deborah Khider and Emma Aronson have been awarded with the EarthCube Community Service and Leadership Award, which recognizes EarthCube volunteers who contributed significantly and measurably to advancing the goals of EarthCube.
Deborah is a true EarthCube success story: she joined the LinkedEarth project as a postdoc in 2016, fusing her interests in paleoclimatology and informatics. Since then, she has transformed into a full-blown geoscience data scientist, working with Yolanda Gil at the Information Sciences Institute. She has led the development of the Pyleoclim Python package, and has led the development of online training events to entrain rank&file geoscientists into the EarthCube research ecosystem. She was a featured speaker at the 2019 AGU Fall Meeting for leading the reporting standard PaCTS (Khider et al, 2019). In 2021 she led the PaleoCube proposal, which got funded by EarthCube, completing her journey from postdoc to principal investigator. Deborah is very involved in EarthCube governance, having served on the EarthCube annual meeting organizing committee in 2019 and 2020 and serving currently the co-chair for the Council of Funded Projects. Deborah's trajectory and activities are emblematic of what EarthCube was meant to catalyze: true collaborations between geoscientists and computer scientists, using technology to advance the geosciences. It would be fitting for the EarthCube community to recognize her tireless work in this way, as she is truly a "one-of-a-kind" geoscientist, and it would be important to the EarthCube mission to encourage others to emulate her example.
Dr. Aronson has served two terms as the Co-Chair of the Science Committee, and two terms as the Chair of the Science Committee and representative on the Leadership Council. Dr. Aronson coordinated the workshop that led to, and was an author of, the GeoScience 2020 EarthCube document that laid out the science vision that we continue to work towards. Dr. Aronson has served as Lead PI of an EarthCube Integrative Activity grant, actively collaborates with two other EarthCube projects/tools, and leads one of the recently selected CZ Thematic Clusters in the new CZ Cluster Network. She also led an effort on Notebook fellowships and has volunteered for numerous working groups within the EarthCube community.
