Professor Gerald Haug was awarded the Leibniz Prize in March 2007. This is the most prestigious German science prize and the award underlines his position as one of the most highly-regarded German scientists and experts on climate change.

Gerald Haug studied Geology at the University of Karlsruhe before moving to the University of Kiel in 1995. After completing his doctorate, he spent the following four years in Kiel, Vancouver, Woods Hole and Los Angeles, before taking a position at the ETH (Technical School) in Zurich.

From 2003 to 2007 he was head of the “Climate Dynamics and Sediment” section at the Geo-Research Centre in Potsdam (GFZ) and taught at the University of Potsdam. In 2007 he accepted an offer from the ETH to become Professor of Climate Geology in Zurich, which allowed him more time to conduct research.

His work in the area of climate dynamics in the last great warm- and ice-ages was highly praised and widely quoted by his peers. Based on sediment from lakes and seas, and using highly innovative methods, he was able to reconstruct climatic changes during the earth’s early history. The development of the great ice-age in the northern hemisphere, about 2.7 million years ago is one of the oldest puzzles in Paleo-climate research. Gerald Haug was able to develop a plausible explanation and show that the north Pacific was the crucial source of moisture for the American ice sheet and the entire northern hemisphere. He was able to prove that the changes in the polar and sub-polar oceans was linked to the exchange of CO2 between the ocean and the atmosphere.

Awards
Albert Maucher Prize for Geosciences – German Science Foundation (DFG) (2001)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Prize – German Science Foundation (DFG) (12/2006)