Franziska A. Lechleitner

CL Climate: Past, Present & Future

The 2021 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Franziska A. Lechleitner for her contributions to the understanding of the past climate and environment as recorded in speleothems.

Franziska Anna Lechleitner received her PhD from ETH Zurich in 2016. Her thesis, entitled “Characterizing the legacy of carbon in karst systems: isotopic and chronological applications on stalagmites”, focused on carbon isotopic composition as recorded in speleothems and its use for studies of past environments.

In this early stage of her scientific career, Lechleitner has made significant contributions in high-resolution studies of speleothems. Together with her collaborators, she developed strategies for sampling and dating these unique records. Her work is of regional and global significance. Lechleitner’s skilled use of geochronological tools is essential for understanding the global connections of the past climate. The most recent studies of the records from permafrost illustrate the significance of her work for understanding future climate changes.

As a young Quaternary geoscientist, Lechleitner is interested in the records of past climate and environment. The archives of her choice are speleothems. Her research combines field and monitoring observations and geochemical techniques, which allow the reconstruction of the pattern of changes in climate and terrestrial ecosystems. Lechleitner is dedicated to developing geochronological tools that would enable more accurate and precise chronologies of speleothems, allowing for correlation of records on a global scale.

Franziska Anna Lechleitner is a member of steering committee of the PAGES working group SISAL (Speleothem Isotopes Synthesis and Analysis).

Lechleitner is a young scientist representing the very best of our current and future palaeoclimate researchers and thus deserves the Climate: Past, Present and Future Division’s Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award.