2021 Service Award for Christian Koeberl

It is our great honor to celebrate the service and achievements of Professor Christian Koeberl, who was recognized by the Meteoritical Society with the Service Award in 2021 for his endeavors as a chronic volunteer for the society. His efforts include direct service to our society in organizing meetings, serving on committees, and working as an editor for our journals, as well as his leadership as Director General of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, which resulted in enhancing public exposure and education about meteorites and acquiring new meteorites for the museum and for research. Christian studied chemistry and physics at the Technical University of Vienna in Austria, as well as astronomy at the University of Vienna, and then received a PhD in astronomy and chemistry from the University of Graz in Austria in 1983 and finally joined the University of Vienna where he has remained for his career. In 1988, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and spent three summers at the NASA Johnson Space Center and the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston, where he met his wife Dona Jalufka who was then working at the LPI. As many colleagues know, Christian loves to travel, and over the years, he has been a visiting scientist at the Carnegie Institute in Washington DC, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Wits University in South Africa, and the Open University in Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, in addition to many geological field expeditions to study impact craters. In 2009, he became a Full Professor of “Impact Research and Planetary Geology” at the University of Vienna. Professor Peter Englert is a long-term colleague of Christian's and introduced Janice Bishop to Christian in 1988, when they helped set up an internship for her with Christian in Vienna for several months in 1989. That summer Christian organized the Meteoritical Society meeting in Vienna (Figure 1), and she was able to witness firsthand his tireless efforts on behalf of our society, leading organization of the scientific programming and the local details for the meeting, handling myriads of issues large and small for participants, and planning a fascinating trip to the thousand-year-old Benedictine Abbey at Melk and a nearby castle, Grafenegg, where the conference banquet was held. Christian's meeting in Vienna was one of the largest Meteoritical Society meetings to date. Since then Christian has continued to volunteer for the Meteoritical Society in many ways, including working on the organizing and program committees of several other meteoritics-related conferences and workshops in Europe and around the world. He has also provided service to the Meteoritical Society through participation on several committees, including the Nominating Committee, Council, Publications Committee, Joint Publications Committee, the Leonard Medal Committee, the Barringer Award Committee, the Membership Committee, and the new Impact Crater Committee. However, Christian's longest and most intense engagement in serving the Meteoritical Society has been and continues to be his dedication to our society's journals and publication committees. He was an Associate Editor for Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta from 1990 to 2022 and has been an Associate Editor for Meteoritics and Planetary Science since 2007. In addition to service through committee work and editorial duties, Christian served the Meteoritical Society as a member of the ANSMET team in 1986, for which he received the 1987 Antarctic Service Medal of the USA. He is a Fellow of the Meteoritical Society, the Geological Society of South Africa, and the Geological Society of America (GSA). He has received several notable awards including the Meritorious Service Award from Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, the Barringer Medal and Award, and the GSA Distinguished Service Award. Because of his outstanding science achievements and stellar outreach work giving countless public talks and presentations on meteorites, impacts, and planetary science, Christian was selected as the Director General of the Natural History Museum in Vienna in 2010, where he served until 2020. As Director, he transformed this important but rather musty 270-year-old collection of minerals, meteorites, gems, and other specimens into a modern and engaging museum using virtual reality and sensory experiences that has become a popular outing for families, tourists, and schools (Figure 2). Largely due to Christian's improvements while Director, the number of museum visitors more than doubled to 842,000 per year by 2019. Also as Director, he solicited research funds to upgrade the research laboratories and cultivated donations for meteorite acquisitions (Figure 3) that have become available for research as well as display. In summary, we are thrilled to celebrate Professor Christian Koeberl as the 2021 recipient of the Meteoritical Society Service Award. This is a fitting honor for the decades-long exceptional service he has generously contributed to the Meteoritical Society and our community's investigation of meteorites and impact craters (Figure 4) and for his leadership in presenting the fascination of meteorites to the community in an engaging and entertaining manner.