Susan Trumbore elected to the Order Pour le mérite

At its meeting in Berlin on June 9, 2024, the Chapter of the Order elected the writer, philosopher and filmmaker Alexander Kluge and the mathematician Gerd Faltings as domestic members of the Order and the geologist Susan Trumbore and the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt as foreign members. 

The Order therefore has 34 German and 37 foreign members, including 17 Nobel Prize winners.
Election to the Order Pour le mérite is one of the highest honors that can be conferred on scientists and artists in Germany. The association of artists and scholars was founded in 1842 by Prussian King Frederick William IV and revived in 1952 by Federal President Theodor Heuss. The first Chancellor of the Order was the natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt.
The Order Pour le mérite is under the protectorate of the Federal President. It is financed and organized by the Minister of State for Culture and the Media.

Susan Trumbore researches the interactions between the biosphere, atmosphere and climate, in particular the processes and feedbacks that influence greenhouse gases. Her core expertise lies in the application of radiocarbon and stable isotopes to questions of ecology, soil biogeochemistry and the terrestrial carbon cycle. Her overarching research goal is to understand the role of the terrestrial biosphere in the global carbon cycle by quantifying the residence time of carbon in ecosystems and understanding the processes that explain observed age and residence time variations. She studies ecosystems that have a potentially strong but uncertain response to climate change, including tropical forests and drylands. Trumbore leads the German part of the German-Brazilian ATTO (Amazon Tall Tower Observatory) program, which studies the interactions between intact tropical forests and the atmosphere.

Trumbore is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Professor (20%) of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine and Honorary Professor at the Institute of Geosciences at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. She is a Fellow of the Geochemical Society, the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Leopoldina (German Academy of Sciences) and the Academia Europeae (European Academy of Sciences). She is the founding editor-in-chief of the scientific journal AGU Advances.

The press release was kindly made available to us by the Order Pour le mérite.