Congratulations to Dr Adriana Dutkiewicz, who has been awarded the Lee Allison Award for Outstanding Contributions to Geoinformatics and Data Science by the Geological Society of America Geoinformatics and Data Science Division. This annual award recognises distinguished contributions to the geosciences through the application and promotion of geoinformatics.
Adriana's work has helped transform how large, complex geological and oceanographic datasets are analysed, visualised and shared. Her research has applied machine learning, spatio-temporal data mining and digital mapping to questions ranging from Australian precious opal prospectivity to global seafloor sediments, deep-sea manganese nodules, contourite drifts, abyssal circulation and carbonate compensation depth.
Her contributions include the first digital global map of seafloor sediments, widely used in teaching and research; co-development of the cloud-based GPlates Portal, which has reached users in more than 190 countries; and community tools such as pyBacktrack, which reconstructs the paleobathymetry of ocean drill sites.
More broadly, Adriana's work exemplifies the power of geoinformatics to reveal new patterns in Earth history, connect marine geology with climate and ocean circulation, and provide data-driven foundations for decision-making in areas such as deep-sea mining and carbon-cycle research.
Congratulations Adriana on this well-deserved recognition!
