Ellen Thomas grew up in a small town in the eastern Netherlands, where the expectation was that she would become a housewife. Instead, Ellen went to Utrecht University and studied Geology, at that time one of the more strongly male dominated areas of science. Our class of geology students started in 1968 with 24 students, of which two were women. The professors made it very clear that women were not welcome in the profession, they would make too many problems with fieldwork, and stated loud and clear ‘that there were easier ways to find a husband than study geology’. Ellen became one of the best PhD students in  micropaleontology at Utrecht University. We subsequently moved to the US for postdoctoral work at Arizona State University, and Ellen soon got a job at Scripps Institute of Oceanography with the (then) Deep Sea Drilling Program (DSDP).

       Afterwards we moved East, I got a job at Wesleyan University, and Ellen continued her DSDP work at Lamont-Doherty (Columbia University) in NY. Ellen never got her own job at Wesleyan, despite her stellar record in research and later in teaching. She became however the first female tenured senior lecturer at the Earth Science Department at Cambridge University, UK, in the 1990s, from where she moved on to Yale University (slightly closer to Wesleyan!), where she became a research scientist and still is. Since 2015 we shared my position at Wesleyan, and we retired in 2021. 

       Over the years, Ellen has received several awards and medals, mainly for her 40-year long studies of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum as an analog for modern climate change, including the Maurice Ewing Medal from AGU/Ocean Naval Research. And she is a member of our GSC! But in January 2023, her telephone rang, and out of the blue the director of a Max Planck Institute in Germany told her the happy news that she was the co-recipient of the ‘Frontiers of Knowledge’ Prize in Climate Change, together with her collaborator Jim Zachos from UC Santa Cruz, to be handed out in Spain by the bank that created these awards (BBVA). We had never heard of these awards that are given annually in eight different fields of knowledge, including music. But…. about 30% of the recipients go on to receive a Nobel Prize later in life, so it is a distinctive honor. So we went with our whole family for this once-in-a-lifetime event to Bilbao, Spain and enjoyed a 4-day fiesta that included a guided tour of the Guggenheim Museum of Arts, dinners, concerts, and cocktail receptions. The final day was the award ceremony with speeches by the laureates Ellen was interviewed by TV and newspapers, and ended up with two front page articles in the National Spanish press. All of Bilbao had large banners in the streets with photos of the laureates.

       When Ellen defended her PhD in 1979, her colleagues said, “Nice work, but who would really care about our climate millions of years ago?”. How times have changed. So to all female geology students out there who may feel now and then discouraged by being a woman in the still male-dominated STEM field, hang in there, work hard, and wonderful things may happen to you.

Ellen [was] the ‘Flint Lecturer’ at Yale University in October 2023.

Links:
BBVA Awards website
www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=1jtwsROMKok