QIN Liping, a professor of geochemistry at the School of Earth and Space Sciences, USTC has won the 2014 Houtermans Medal from the European Association of Geochemistry. She is the first Chinese to receive this prize.

The Houtermans award recognizes a single exceptional contribution to geochemistry by a scientist no more than 35 years of age or within six years of having earned a Ph.D. The prize is named in honor of Friedrich Georg Houtermans, a Dutch-Austrian-German physicist,. Former recipients of the medal include many world-recognized geochemists such as Marc Chaussidon (CNRS Nancy, France), Ken Farley (California Institute of Technology), Eric Hauri (Carnegie Institution) and Nicolas Dauphas (University of Chicago).

QIN is doing column chemistry in a clean room. (Image by QIN)

Prof. QIN is from Shandong Province and finished her undergraduate degree at USTC. After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2007, she did a postdoc at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. under a Carnegie Fellowship. She subsequently conducted research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a Geological Postdoctoral Fellow.
In 2012, QIN was recruited by USTC through China's National Thousand Talent Program. Her research focuses on understanding planetary formation and differentiation in the early solar system, as well as the astronomical environments of solar system formation inferred from nucleosynthetic anomalies preserved in meteorites. Prof. QIN's recent research also involves employing nontraditional isotope systems to trace biological and other surficial processes. She has published many papers in international scientific journals such as Science, Geochimica Cosmochimica et Acta, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, and Nature Geoscience, and is well recognized in her field.
The award will be presented at the Goldschmidt Conference in Sacramento, California, USA this June. The conference is the premier international academic meeting in the field of geochemistry.