2013 Leonard Medal for Ahmed El Goresy

Ladies and gentlemen, we have the great honor and pleasure to introduce to you Ahmed El Goresy as the awardee of the Leonard Medal of the year 2013. Ahmed El Goresy has had an amazing long career dedicated to meteoritics and planetary sciences. He conducted pluridisciplinary research on extraterrestrial materials demonstrating that mineralogy, petrology, experimental petrology, and isotope geochemistry are complementary essentials. His success and exceptional productivity covering a broad area of scientific issues emerges from his unique gift for careful petrographic observations that are the prerequisite of all his studies. His thorough knowledge of scientific literature in mineralogy and phase equilibria allows him to make scientific predictions with a strong aspiration to challenge new paradigms—his studies on refractory inclusions and opaque minerals led to a better understanding of the complexity of processes that affected primitive bodies in the early solar system. He dedicated an immense part of his career to the study of high-pressure mineral assemblages in shocked planetary materials. Ahmed El Goresy considers himself a descendent of the grand Echnaton, also called Akhenaten, his great favorite pharaonic ancestor; perhaps, because he appreciates his unique style of high quality of picturial arts and outstanding pharaonic poetry. Ahmed is indeed a distinguished and erudite person, a connoisseur of arts and culture, and keenly interested in history and archeology. He devoted a lot of scientific research for 15 years to the old archeological pigments, archeometry, and anthropology studies in Egypt using innovating analytical techniques to decipher the history of past civilizations. However, it is perhaps also from ongoing interest in the religion this monotheistic pharaoh attempted to establish giving the Solar deity a status above mere stony gods. At the age of 4, young Ahmed was already selected in an elite kindergarten under the patronage of the queen of Egypt for his keen perception for music and natural dance skills! He used to spend vacation every year the whole month of August with his parents, sisters, and brothers at the Cleopatra beach in Alexandria while Europe was on fire during World War II. After receiving his B.Sc. degree in 1955, in Cairo, he moved to Germany and he received his PhD at the University of Heidelberg on ore minerals of basic igneous rocks and ore microscopy in 1961 under the supervision of Paul Ramdohr (his last and best student!), the pioneer and “Pope” of ore microscopy, his sun! And very soon after escaping the dictatorship of Nasser, he emigrated from Egypt in November 1963 back to Heidelberg, his beloved medieval city and directly climbed the beautiful wooden hills above the castle. There, he took a position at the Max-Planck Institut für Kernphysik. The Cosmochemistry Department provided a truly interdisciplinary research environment. It was equipped with the most modern analytical machinery—at that time, rarely to be found in geoscience laboratories in Europe. In 1967, he spent some months as guest scientist at Harvard University working with John Wood, and then 2 years at the Carnegie Institution of Washington as a postdoctoral fellow with Gunnar Kullerud. Ahmed's petrologic acumen has always been guided by the invaluable experience doing experimental petrology of sulfide systems. Back at Heidelberg, he followed Ramdohr's work with deeper understanding in phase equilibria and developed his exceptional skills as a microscopist aspiring to move beyond the state-of-the-art. In 1969, he became senior scientist, the star mineralogical cosmochemist. Luckily, the German federal minister of scientific research wanted to boost German scientists accepted by NASA to work on Apollo 11 samples. Later, in 1977, he was selected by NASA as Investigator on the Apollo Lunar sample analyses program. His request to get funds to purchase an electron microprobe was agreed only after 2 weeks. He got his habilitation in 1970 and became Professor of Petrology in 1976. Joseph Zähringer's scientific fame and ElGo's hard workers made the lab at the time the “must-visit” stop for cosmochemists in Europe. Ahmed is meticulous, a true and rare mineralogist who never leaves a detail unstudied. ElGo taught us the value of painstaking selection of crystals starting with the optical microscope, SEM, electron, and ion probes. He was also involved in the careful elaboration of analytical programs for the ARL electron microprobe with Larry Finger. In 1971, Ahmed had already the first fully automated electron microprobe in Europe, the second after that of the Geophysical Lab! Catherine remembers during SEM and EMPA analytical sessions how Ahmed would be excited at the thought of venturing to unravel the nature and history of carbonaceous chondrites in thin sections and share with his dozen of students and postdocs from various countries rejoicing at our exciting new results. Like when we observed the famous “Fremdlinge” in unique refractory inclusions. He has a selfless devotion to helping others understand! Ahmed said many times: “I am doing science because I am fond of finding unexpected phenomena that bring new knowledge to our community.” Ahmed has affected the research of so many talented scientists across generations. He had not less than 25 Ph.D. students, nine between 1985 and 1989 (including Catherine). All his students and postdocs benefited from his extensive knowledge of transparent and particularly opaque minerals, mineralogical, or experimental petrology. He has real pleasure to be immediately caught by new challenge to address the mechanisms of formation, of prime importance to decipher the record of the solar nebula, and parent body processes. We used to have prolonged electron microprobe sessions at the bucolic place “Bierhelderhof” where we engaged in passionate scientific exchanges about our last unusual observations and discoveries and made bets, and many predictions that were later tested analytically. Ahmed was stubborn and we had to work hard to convince him! We are grateful for the privilege of sharing very simply his eclectic knowledge. Most of us still enjoy longstanding collaboration because doing science with Ahmed is fun! Ahmed is a world-class scientist with a special talent to gather selected top researchers to attack scientific enigma. He showed a great tenacity to perform innovative research in a variety of planetary materials. He discovered the “Fremdlinge,” worked on correlated mineralogy and isotopic studies in refractory inclusions demonstrating that CAIs were formed in different nebular regions with different isotopic signatures. He showed that EH chondrites must stem from a variety of parent asteroids with individual thermal histories, a result that has far-reaching implications for comparative planetology. He discovered the minerals Armalcolite and Tranquillityite with John Lovering. Ahmed has made tremendous discoveries of high-pressure minerals such as the stishovite polymorphs, lingunite, akaogite, crystalline carbon harder than diamond, or recently a Li-niobate structured in gneiss from the Ries crater, and transformation textures. These discoveries opened new fields of research for understanding the temperature and pressure history experienced during shock events and the interior of planets in the early solar system. One of his most recent research achievements is the publication in GCA of his work on the observation of shock-induced deformation of Martian shergottites where he depicts robust pressure estimation. We cannot enumerate all his contributions to our community. Among other distinctions, he received the Victor-Moritz-Goldschmidt Award in 1972 for its outstanding research on lunar petrology and innovative micro-analytical techniques in petrology. In 2003, he was awarded the Abraham-Gottlob-Werner Medal of the German Mineralogical Society for his research achievements in meteoritics, and his discovery of numerous shock-induced high-pressure minerals in chondrites, Mars meteorites, and the Ries crater. He was Fairchild distinguished Scholar in CALTECH in 1983/1984. In 1998, Ahmed officially retired from his academic position in Heidelberg. Nevertheless, he surprisingly maintained a phenomenal level of productivity. He co-authored 40 papers within the last 10 years! Figure 1 shows Ahmed at his beloved sophisticated optical microscope. MPI für Kernphysik gave him a microscope as a present upon his “official” retirement. He continues to distill his communicative enthusiasm for fundamental research. After 6 years spent at MPI in Mainz, Ahmed holds a guest professor position at the Bayerisches GeoInstitut in Germany. He is also frequently invited in Japan, China, the United States, and France to teach opaque mineralogy or to give lectures on his exiting last discoveries, or to conduct collaborative research. Ahmed's strong, opinionated, and generous personality triggered a lot of scientific discussions, but he has got a real fan club. Among other supporters, let us quote Gerry Wasserburg stressing that ElGo is “THE premier petrographer of meteorites.” Surendra Saxena compares him to “Sherlock Holmes willing to explore all avenues to detect new phases and new interpretations of microscopic observations.” Don Clayton adds that, as a major advance in understanding the origin of the solar system, Ahmed El Goresy “provided mineralogical characterizations of certain minerals that proved in collaboration with isotopic chemists (Gerry Wasserburg, Ernst Zinner, Bob Clayton, and Don Clayton) to be presolar stardust.” This overwhelming support from his peers allowed him to obtain the Leonard Medal, which is the highest honor of the Meteoritical Society after 50 years of a brilliant and continuing career in meteoritics. We wish to add that his noncompromising political opinions (he used to drive in a French red car!) have fostered his relentless drive to support, sometimes with the necessary discretion, the fight for human rights and social progress in Egypt, his country of origin!

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