Gerald Haug

Gerald Haug is a paleoclimatologist, marine geologist and paleoceanographer. He studied geology at the Universy of Karlsruhe and obtained his PhD at the University of Kiel in 1995. Afterwards, he did investigations in postdoctoral positions at the GEOMAR Center for Marine Geosciences in Kiel, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, USA, and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, USA. In 2003, he became a Professor at the University of Potsdam and worked at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, as well in Potsdam. In 2007, he became Professor for Climate Geology at the ETH Zurich. Since 2015 he is Professor for Climate Geochemistry at the ETH Zurich and Director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Chemistry in Mainz. In 2020, he took office as the President of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Gerald Haugs scientific research focuses on the development of the Earth climate over thousands to millions of years. He analyses sediment cores from the sea floor and lakes, amongst several other climate archives. The chemical composition of the different sediment layers provides clues to the prevailing climatic conditions at the time of deposition. This allows quantitative reconstructions of past climate conditions and the underlying processes in the ocean, atmosphere and climate system. He is member in the Scientific Advisory Board of the Werner Siemens Foundation and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). His work has been awarded with the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) as well as memberships in the Academia Europaea, the Mainz Academy of Science and Literature and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.