University of Oregon PhD graduate Juergen Schieber has just won the prestigious Sorby Medal in recognition 'of his extensive research that has revolutionized our understanding of mud and shale sedimentology.'  Dr. Schieber completed his doctoral degree in 1985 under the advising of Mark Reed, and now is a professor of sedimentology at Indiana University. 

The award story link follows: https://earth.indiana.edu/news-alumni/department-news/2022-schieber-ias-award.html

In his PhD research and subsequently, Juergen has taken on the examination of the heretofore baffling minute and multitudinous details of textures of mud rocks, as revealed in thin sections and by SEM.  He has been remarkably successful in extracting unrecognized evidence for how mudrocks form.  Since the finding of mudrocks on Mars, he has been a leader in making sense of Martian geologic history, as revealed in those rocks, for which we have no thin sections, but we do have close-up photographs, XRD data, and chemical composition data.  Along the way, Juergen has executed unique sedimentation experiments in his laboratory that have revealed some quite unexpected features of how mud-sized particles are transported and deposited to form shales and siltstones.  More experiments demonstrate how those rocks erode in aeolian environments, among others, yielding the mudrock outcrops we see on Earth and Mars.