The Council of the National Academy of Sciences has approved the nomination of Marcia K. McNutt, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, for election as president of the Academy, to succeed Ralph J. Cicerone when his second term as NAS president ends on July 1, 2016.
A geophysicist, McNutt earned her bachelor’s degree in physics at Colorado College and her PhD in earth sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego. Her research concentration is in marine geophysics, where she has used a variety of remote sensing techniques from ships and space to probe the dynamics of the mantle and overlying plates far from plate boundaries on geologic time scales. She is the author or co-author of more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and has made important contributions to the understanding of the rheology and strength of the lithosphere. She has demonstrated that a deep-seated, large-scale mantle thermal anomaly has been very persistent. It is not only producing midplate volcanoes in the island chains above its location deep beneath the central Pacific, but also produced older volcanic chains now submerged in the northwest Pacific that erupted as the Pacific plate drifted over the central Pacific over the last 100 million years.
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