2020 Service Award for Agnieszka Baier

It is with great pleasure and honor to present Agnieszka Baier, the Managing Editor of our journal “Meteoritics and Planetary Science” (MAPS) for the 2020 Service Award of the Meteoritical Society. Agnieszka was born in Poland and had an early fascination with the sky and with astronomy, starting already in childhood while she was still in primary school. She notes that she spent some cold nights on her balcony with a small telescope, and also wanting to learn English so she could read the well-known magazine “Sky and Telescope” and a cousin from the United States brought her some copies and from then on she was spending all pocket money on the subscription, which in the early 1980s in Poland was not cheap. At this time, Agnieszka thought that her future was in astronomy, but (which sounds somewhat familiar) her parents did not encourage this because science in Poland was totally underfunded, and no career opportunities seemed to be in sight. Therefore, Agnieszka ended up studying English at the University of Marie-Curie in Lublin, Poland, where her family lived at that time. She notes that after 5 years of pretending that she “was interested in English literature, phonology and similar stuff, and watching lots of Star Trek and reading sci-fi instead”, she received her Master's degree, after writing a thesis that focused on science-fiction literature instead of torturing over some medieval poem (Figures 1 and 2). So instead of becoming a scientist, Agnieszka became a journalist for a national radio station and a weekly news magazine, where she covered astronomy and planetary science. Her stories were well received and subsequently she started reporting from various scientific meetings abroad. One of the AGU meetings in San Francisco led to an interview that led to her move to the United States; then she came to the United States in 1999 for what was to be a 1-year-long, maybe 2-year-long public outreach project at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Unfortunately, this project was cut short after several months when the Mars Polar Lander did not make it to the surface of Mars. Faced with returning to Poland and her journalist job, she tried to figure out a way to stay in Tucson; it helped that there she also met her future husband, Stephan (who is originally from Germany), and that there was an advertisement for a job opening at the journal office for “Radiocarbon” in Tucson (with Tim Jull as editor). Thus, Agnieszka became assistant editor at the journal “Radiocarbon” from 2001, and at the start of 2003, when our journal MAPS moved to Tucson (in the capable hands of our editor, Tim Jull), became Production Editor of MAPS, but within 2 months already took over as managing editor—a position which she has been holding since early 2003. All of us who have had interactions with the journal in any form or fashion, no matter if as authors, reviewers, associate editor, from Council, or the publications committees, have had interactions with Agnieszka, and they were always pleasant, highly professional, problem-solving (if there were any), courteous, and friendly (the author of these lines speaks from experience, having interacted with Agnieszka in all the functions listed above). She keeps the journal running and deals with grumpy authors and reviewers on the one side and tedious publishers on the other—anybody who knows about what is involved in managing the journal will have a very high appreciation of her work and her professionalism. She has truly been serving the society and the broader scientific community above and beyond her duties and we all owe thanks to her for being the “Wizard behind the Curtain” of MAPS.