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Subject: Nicolas Gruber Receives the Rosenstiel Award!

Dr. Nicolas Gruber received the 28th Annual Rosenstiel Award at a banquet held on April 8, 2004, on the University of Miami's RSMAS campus. The award recognizes outstanding achievement and distinction in the oceanographic sciences by an early to mid career scientist, which this year was given in the area of marine and atmospheric chemistry. Citation to the award: Dr. Gruber is a marine biogeochemist who, though early in his career, has led important advances in furthering our understanding of global ocean’s carbon and nitrogen cycles. He received his Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of Bern in Natural Sciences under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Stocker. Dr. Gruber currently serves as an Assistant Professor with the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). The Rosenstiel Award is given to early career ocean scientists who have shown both great promise and accomplishment, and these are normally marked by the degree of impact a scientist has on his scientific peers. Dr. Gruber impressively met these criteria with his first 2 peer reviewed papers, both of which have had high impact in the ocean science community. His first paper (Gruber et al., 1996) developed a method for detecting the anthropogenic carbon transient in the ocean using dissolved inorganic carbon observations and transient tracers, in combination with estimates of stoichiometric ratios in organic matter. Approximately one third of the carbon dioxide produced by man’s activities (termed anthropogenic CO2, which is the CO2 released by activities such as petroleum burning) accumulates in the ocean. Once in the surface ocean it is transported with ocean currents and mixing to the deep sea for relatively long term storage. Separating this small anthropogenic signal from the very large natural carbon signal in the ocean was the central challenge Dr. Gruber faced. His technique overcame problems that had beset earlier attempts to estimate the anthropogenic transient, and provided us with a first solid observationally-based estimate of the oceanic inventory of anthropogenic CO2. The paper has become a classic that has been followed by a large number of papers that have further tested the method and applied it to a wide variety of other data sets for all the ocean basins. Dr. Gruber’s second paper (Gruber and Sarmiento, 1997) has had a comparable impact to his first. In it, he conducted an analysis of the global distribution of oceanic nitrogen fixation and denitrification using a new way of defining the deviation of nitrogen in seawater from its expected ratio to phosphorus. Nitrogen fixation is the biological process whereby inert nitrogen gas is converted to a combined form of nitrogen that is available to plants as a nutrient. Much of the marine primary production is thought to be nitrogen limited, so processes that add (nitrogen fixation) or remove (dentrification) this nutrient are of major consequence to the marine carbon cycle. This paper has changed the way we think about the marine nitrogen cycle and many investigations on the nitrogen cycle have ensued as a result of his work. Dr. Gruber already has an impressive record of scholarly publications that reflect his unusual strength in integrating observational and modeling investigations of ocean processes. This integration is the key to several breakthroughs that he has achieved in marine biogeochemistry. His career should be one of continued scientific leadership and important advances.

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