Awards

CSDMS Awards

CSDMS 2026 awards

Congratulations Nicole Gasparini, winner of the 2026 CSDMS Distinguished Career Award!

Congratulations Caitlin Turner, winner of the 2026 Student Modeler Award!

CSDMS Distinguished Career Award ^(a)

About

Since 2010, the CSDMS Distinguished Career Award ^(a) has been bestowed for outstanding and sustained achievements in earth surface processes modeling research and service contributions to the global CSDMS community. Examples of what that may look like are:

• fundamental advances in the development and application of earth-surface dynamics theory;
• use of computational modeling to shed light on earth-surface systems;
• development of new computational techniques and/or tools;
• contributions to, development of, and/or applications of, high-quality community open-source software for modeling and/or analysis;
• contributions to community science advances related to modeling and/or earth-surface dynamics;
• contributions that are/were sustained over a full career; and,
• contributions to teaching and mentoring the next generation of scientist.

^(a) The CSDMS Distinguished Career Award was previously the CSDMS lifetime achievement award

Past Recipients

• 2026 Nicole Gasparini
• 2025 Brad Murray
• 2024 Randy Leveque
• 2023 Courtney Harris
• 2022 Dano Roelvink
• 2021 Efi Foufoula-Georgiou
• 2020 Garry Willgoose
• 2019 Jaia Syvitski
• 2018
• 2017 Bob Anderson
• 2016 Mary Hill
• 2015 Chris Paola
• 2014 Pat Wiberg
• 2013 Alan Howard
• 2012
• 2011 Rudy Slingerland
• 2010 Gary Parker

Student Modeler Award

About

Since 2011, graduate students and first-year postdocs studying earth and planetary surface processes have been invited to compete for the Syvitski Student Modeler Award. Awardees are chosen based on ingenuity, applicability, and advancement of modeling of earth and planetary surface processes. The student modeler award is named in honor of Jaia Syvitski, the founding executive director of CSDMS from 2001 to 2017, who has inspired countless modelers. Awardees are selected based on the following criteria:

Software

• Software development practices
• Open source code licensing
• Public availability of code
• Code quality
• Documentation quality
• Build/run procedures

Science

• Quality/complexity of the scientific problem
• Follows the CSDMS philosophy
• Modeling is an important component in the project
• Modeling is executed appropriately
• Modeling demonstrates attributes that exceed current common practices

Past Recipients

• 2026 Caitlin Turner
• 2025 Marie-Christin Wimmler
• 2024 Sebrian Beselly
• 2023 Kyle Wright
• 2022 Marco Tangi
• 2021 Arye Janoff
• 2020 Ian Reeves
• 2019 Lettie Roach
• 2018 Julio Hoffiman Mendes
• 2017 Julia Moriarty
• 2016 Anders Damsgaard
• 2015 Jean-Arthur Olive
• 2014 Ajay Limaye
• 2013 Surendra Adhikari
• 2012
• 2011 Man Liang

Information on the Syvitski Student Modeler Award competition can be found here.