“I’m honored and humbled by this recognition”, said Ledwell. “Many of colleagues, especially at WHOI, are at least as deserving and a source of endless motivation and inspiration for me.”
Ledwell is best known for pioneering the use of perflourinated tracers to study ocean mixing and circulation, driven largely by the need to understand the role of the ocean in Earth’s climate system.
After earning a Ph.D. for Harvard University in 1982 and studying for two years as a National Research Council Fellow at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Ledwell worked at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory from 1984 to 1990 before moving to WHOI and conducting tracer experiments on more than 50 research cruises. In 2007, he was awarded the Alexander Agassiz Medal by the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2011 he was made a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.
In a letter supporting Ledwell’s nomination of the award, WHOI physical oceanographer John Toole wrote, I consider Jim to be the ideal scientist and leader: brilliant, diligent, soft spoken and understated. Ledwell will be formally recognized by TOS on February 13, 2018, during a ceremony in Portland, Oregon, at the semiannual Ocean Sciences.
