Moore Medal Honors UC s Brett

Carlton E. Brett, professor of geology in UC's McMicken College of Arts & Sciences, has been awarded the distinguished Moore Medal by the Society for Sedimentary Geology. He received the honor at the society’s annual meeting in Long Beach, California on April 24.

The Raymond C. Moore Paleontology Medal is awarded in recognition of "excellence in paleontology." Nominees for the medal are scientists who have a significant record of outstanding contributions in paleontology, especially those aspects of paleontology that promote the science of stratigraphy through research in paleontology and evolution, and the use of fossils for interpretations of paleoecology. The medal is awarded annually by SEPM, Society for Sedimentary Geology, an international organization based in Tulsa, Oklahoma..

“I am very honored to receive this award, especially as R.C. Moore was something of a hero to me as a kid, even though I never met the man,” Brett said. “It is remarkable to be honored for doing what is really a life-long passion/addiction.”

Brett recalled that he first encountered the name R.C. Moore in the library at Buffalo State College, where he tried to identify the fossils he collected from a rip-rap along the Niagara River. He tried the first book I came upon: the highly technical Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology, edited by Moore.

“A tough source for a beginner, but what did I know? Obviously not much!” Brett said. “Bit by bit, though, I began to learn. By the time I was a high school student I was determined to become a paleontologist and had the goal of working in one of two great meccas for Paleozoic fossils and strata: New York State or the Cincinnati region. Amazingly, I got to do both.”

Brett earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1978, and moved that same year into a faculty position at the University of Rochester.  In 1998, he joined the Department of Geology at the University of Cincinnati.  Among the recognitions achieved in his professional career are the Paleontological Society’s Schuchert Award; election as a fellow of the Paleontological Society and of the Geological Society of America; the Digby McClaren Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Stratigraphic Paleontology, awarded by the International Commission on Stratigraphy at the International Paleontological Congress in Oslo; and receipt in 2005 of an Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize. Brett has published some 230 peer-reviewed papers, 62 guidebook articles, and five edited books, served as associate editor of several journals and supervised 22 Ph.D. and 27 master’s students.  In 2010, he received the University of Cincinnati’s Rieveschl Award for Distinguished Scientific Research.

“Carl is certainly among the most versatile, imaginative, and hard-working researchers anywhere in the allied fields of paleontology and stratigraphy, and he has an encyclopedic memory of anything that he encounters,” said his UC colleague Arnold I. Miller.

Among his research interests is an effort to understand the ecology of the Paleozoic world, hundreds of millions of years ago. Recently, he helped organize a multi-faceted examination of the 450-million-year-old stratigraphy of the Cincinnati region, culminating in a book, Stratigraphic Renaissance in the Cincinnati Arch : Implications for Upper Ordovician Paleontology and Paleoecology, published in 2008 by the Cincinnati Museum Center.

“Carl is, first and foremost, an aficionado of field work and there is no place that he would rather be at any given moment on any given day (or night) in any given weather condition than at a rock outcrop,” Miller said.  “His intuitive grasp of what he observes out in the field and his ability to incorporate these observations into meaningful scientific advances are legendary.”

The citation accompanying the Moore Medal cites Brett’s “uniquely integrative contributions to the study of Earth history, and for his unmatched dedication to field-based pedagogy.”