Hugh St. C. O'Neill

The 2007 Robert Wilhelm Bunsen Medal is awarded to Hugh St. C. O'Neill for his outstanding contributions to mineralogy, petrology and geochemistry. The impact of his work is wide-ranging from laboratory-based techniques to models for the formation of the Earth and Moon.

Hugh’s groundbreaking experimental studies of the stability and structure of earth materials are legendary. He has accomplished a vast achievement of quantifying the thermodynamics of earth materials with a great range of techniques. The implications of his work have been felt in the solid earth sciences in answering questions of the stability of phases in the deep earth. Further, his development of new techniques for extracting thermochemical data from experiments have been astonishingly successful. He has exploded myths in the literature of the Earth sciences through his erudite attention to critical aspects of the origin and evolution of the Earth and Moon. He is the world´s foremost scholar in the application of mineralogy and petrology to constraining our picture of the Earth’s interior.