Presentation of the 2023 Charles Schuchert Award of the Paleontological Society to Erik A. Sperling

To be honest, if Erik didn't work in an office just down the hall from my own, I might wonder if 'Erik Sperling' was the pen name used by some scientific dream team including a paleontologist, a geochemist, an animal physiologist or biological oceanographer, and a sedimentary geologist.In fact, the real Erik is each of these things and, moreover, he's very good at all of them.This extraordinary breadth is no accident.Erik has worked diligently and systematically to build his exceptional skillset.After doing a field-based Master's project on the end-Permian extinction at Stanford under the guidance of Jim Ingle, Erik set off for the East Coast, learning phylogenetics and gene regulatory networks from Kevin Peterson at Dartmouth before embarking on a Ph.D. at Yale under the tutelage of Derek Briggs, where he worked on sponge and brachiopod phylogenetics and took up an interest in the paleobiology of Ediacaran fossils.As a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, Erik studied the iron-sulfur geochemistry of mudrocks with Dave Johnston and the environmental and biological histories of the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods with Francis Macdonald