Thank you, Mike, for your very generous citation and for your support over many years as I moved fields from “dry” mineralogy to “wet” mineralogy. It is a great honor, totally unexpected, to have been nominated for the Roebling Medal and even more surprising to have been chosen. However, I thank those who have supported my nomination, and I thank the MSA for this most prestigious recognition. Scanning through the list of previous Roebling medalists is a really humbling exercise, but I note that I am the first Australian to be awarded this honor since C.E. Tilley in 1954 and W.L. Bragg in 1948.My scientific life in Geosciences seems to me to have been a sequence of lucky circumstances, mostly out of my control. Meeting my future wife Christine, who was studying Geology at Newcastle University in Australia while I was messing around with physics and maths, was a major determinant in how the future would unfold. After graduating as school teachers, we moved to London, where I had the good fortune to discover Birkbeck College, which offered evening undergraduate lectures, so I enrolled for another Bachelor’s degree, this time in Geology (as Christine already had the textbooks). Despite four years of teaching Physics by day and being a student by night, Birkbeck and the Scottish field trips with Dick Merriman were great fun, and inspiring teachers like Brin Roberts and Paul Henderson got me hooked on geology and geochemistry and encouraged me to apply to Cambridge. So, I took the plunge to leave teaching and we moved to Cambridge, with two young children, to be a full-time student again.In Cambridge, Desmond McConnell’s “materials science” approach to mineralogy, phase transformations, and microstructure was an eye-opener and defined my future in the subject. Cambridge was an exciting learning experience, first watching phase transformations in sulfides in an old AEI EM6G TEM and indexing diffraction patterns by hand; studying shocked meteorites with Dave Price and finding and naming wadsleyite; relating microstructures associated with Al,Si ordering in cordierite to NMR spectroscopy with Ross Angel and working with Richard Harrison on microstructures and magnetic properties, just to name a few of the somewhat random projects that took our fancy at the time. There was no real plan except to indulge our curiosity. A chance meeting at a Meteoritical Society conference in Heidelberg somewhat inexplicably led to a substantial funding package over many years to study barite scale formation in North Sea Oil production and to learn about crystal growth and nucleation inhibitors. Meeting Lurdes Fernández-Díaz and Manuel Prieto and their students in Madrid was another lucky event that opened up a new avenue—how solid solutions nucleate and grow from a multicomponent aqueous solution, a problem which one would have thought was solved by physical chemists a century ago, but not so. The interplay between thermodynamics and kinetics in such an apparently simple situation has yet to be fully understood, especially when the solutions are confined in porous media.The study of feldspar microstructures was a major pastime in Cambridge, but it was Ian Parsons from Edinburgh who pointed out that the microstructures we see in Nature are largely the result of reactions between minerals and aqueous solutions. I was slow to appreciate the full significance of this, but the opportunity to move to Münster University in Germany in 1995 provided the resources and the environment to allow a marked shift in my research emphasis. By that time, Christine was back into research, after six children, a Ph.D., and various part-time jobs to prop up her husband’s “full-time occupation.” With Mike Hochella’s help, we set up an AFM lab in Münster. Generous research funding from the European Union, the German Research Council (DFG), and the Humboldt Foundation allowed a steady flow of postdocs, students, and international visitors that provided a very lively research and party atmosphere. Being in the same Institute as Klaus Mezger and his dynamic group gave the place a broader philosophical perspective in both teaching and research.Ian Parsons’s invitation to give a Plenary Lecture at the 2002 IMA in Edinburgh caused me to re-assess my research direction and was a defining point in my career. At around the same time, again by a fortuitous circumstance, I met Håkon Austrheim and Bjørn Jamtveit at a meeting in Norway, and the role of fluids in metamorphism, beyond merely speeding up reactions, also became my research focus. Bjørn’s annual Kongsberg Seminar held over a few days at the historical silver mine provided plenty of food (and drink) for thought on the Physics of Geological Processes (PGP) and gave me the opportunity to meet a wide spectrum of field geologists, modelers, and experimentalists. Over annual field trips to the most beautiful metamorphic rocks and exposures in western Norway, I started re-training and studying the way that interfacial fluids controlled reactions and deformation.As Director of The Institute for Geoscience Research (TIGeR) at Curtin University in Perth from 2015–2020 I had the opportunity of working in Australia again and experiencing the fantastic ancient geology of central and Western Australia on field trips with Tom Raimondo and Ben Grguric as well as seeing the reality of large-scale mining. The annual TIGeR Conference (https://tiger.curtin.edu.au/conferences/), partly modeled on the Kongsberg Seminar, attracted geoscientists from around the world and highlighted the themes that continue to be the focus of my ongoing research.I have been extremely lucky to have had a career that moved smoothly from one project to another and from one country to another, without any great stress, in a well-funded system where I was free to indulge my interests. Of course, having the kind of home support that has also enabled our six children to achieve professional careers also speaks volumes for another cliché’d but true expression – “behind every successful man…”Once again, I thank the MSA for this great honor that I accept with gratitude.

中文翻译：

---

接受美国矿物学会2020年罗布林奖章

谢谢Mike，在我从“干”矿物学转向“湿”矿物学的过程中，您的慷慨引用和多年来的支持。被提名为Roebling奖章是一种巨大的荣誉，这是完全出乎意料的，更令人惊讶的是被选中。但是，我感谢那些支持我的提名的人，也感谢MSA的这一最负盛名的表彰。翻阅以前的Roebling奖牌获得者的名单确实是一个令人羞耻的练习，但我注意到我是自1954年CE Tilley和1948年WL Bragg以来第一个获得此殊荣的澳大利亚人。在我看来，我在地球科学领域的科学生涯一直是一连串的幸运情况，大部分都是我无法控制的。与我未来的妻子克里斯汀见面 我正在研究物理学和数学的同时，他还在澳大利亚纽卡斯尔大学（Newcastle University）学习地质学，这是决定未来发展方式的主要决定因素。从学校老师毕业后，我们搬到了伦敦，在那里我有幸发现了伯克贝克学院（Birkbeck College），该学院提供夜间本科课程，因此这次我又获得了地质学的另一个学士学位（因为克里斯汀已经有了教科书）。尽管白天教了四年物理，晚上当了学生，Birkbeck和苏格兰与Dick Merriman的实地考察还是很有趣的，像Brin Roberts和Paul Henderson这样的启发性老师让我着迷于地质和地球化学，并鼓励我申请剑桥。因此，我急于离开教学，我们带着两个年幼的孩子搬到了剑桥，再次成为一名全日制学生。在剑桥，戴斯蒙德·麦康奈尔（Desmond McConnell）的矿物学，相变和微观结构的“材料科学”方法令人大开眼界，并定义了我在该学科中的未来。剑桥是一次激动人心的学习经历，他首先观察了旧的AEI EM6G TEM中硫化物的相变，并手动为衍射图建立了索引。用戴夫·普莱斯（Dave Price）研究震惊的陨石，并找到和命名瓦兹利（wadsleyite）；将与堇青石中有序的Al，Si相关的微观结构与Ross Angel进行的NMR光谱相关联，并与Richard Richardon合作研究微观结构和磁性，仅举几个当时颇受我们欢迎的随机项目。除了放纵我们的好奇心外，没有真正的计划。在海德堡举行的气象学会会议上的一次偶然的会议，多少有些莫名其妙地导致了多年来的大量资助，以研究北海石油生产中的重晶石水垢形成并了解晶体生长和成核抑制剂。在马德里与LurdesFernández-Díaz和Manuel Prieto以及他们的学生会面是另一个幸运的事件，它开辟了一条新的途径-固溶体如何从多组分水溶液成核和生长，这个问题本来可以被物理化学家解决一个世纪以前，但事实并非如此。在这种看似简单的情况下，热力学与动力学之间的相互作用尚待充分了解，尤其是当溶液局限于多孔介质中时。长石微结构的研究是剑桥的主要消遣，但是爱丁堡的伊恩·帕森斯（Ian Parsons）指出，我们在自然界中看到的微观结构很大程度上是矿物质与水溶液之间反应的结果。我迟迟没有意识到这一切的意义，但是1995年移居德国明斯特大学的机会提供了资源和环境，使我的研究重点有了明显的转变。到那时，克里斯汀（Christine）带着六个孩子，博士学位和各种兼职工作回到她的丈夫的“全职工作”，重新回到研究领域。在Mike Hochella的帮助下，我们在明斯特建立了一个AFM实验室。来自欧盟，德国研究委员会（DFG）和洪堡基金会的慷慨研究资金使博士后，学生和国际访客源源不断，这提供了非常活跃的研究和聚会氛围。与克劳斯·梅斯格（Klaus Mezger）所在的研究所及其充满活力的小组一起为该领域的教学和研究提供了广阔的哲学视野。伊恩·帕森斯（Ian Parsons）受邀在2002年爱丁堡IMA举行的全体会议上致使我重新评估了研究方向，在我的职业生涯中具有决定性意义。大约在同一时间，在一次偶然的情况下，我在挪威的一次会议上遇见了HåkonAustrheim和BjørnJamtveit，流体在变质中的作用，不仅是加速反应，也成为了我的研究重点。比约恩（Bjørn）在历史悠久的银矿举行的一年一度的Kongsberg研讨会，为地质过程物理（PGP）提供了丰富的食物（和饮料），为我提供了思考的机会，并为我提供了与广泛的现场地质学家，建模师和研究人员会面的机会实验主义者。在每年一次的挪威西部最美丽的变质岩和裸露野外考察中，我开始重新培训并研究界面流体控制反应和变形的方式。 2015–2020年，我有机会再次在澳大利亚工作，与Tom Raimondo和Ben Grguric进行实地考察，并体验了澳大利亚中部和西部的奇妙古代地质，并看到了大规模采矿的现实。一年一度的TIGeR会议（https://tiger.curtin.edu.au/conferences/）部分以Kongsberg研讨会为模型，吸引了来自世界各地的地球科学家，并强调了这些主题仍然是我正在进行的研究的重点。我很幸运，能够在一个资金充裕的系统中顺利地从一个项目顺利过渡到另一个项目，从一个国家顺利迁移到另一个国家，而我却可以放任自己的兴趣。当然，有了这样的家庭支持，这也使我们的六个孩子得以实现职业生涯，这也说明了另一种陈词滥调但真实的表达：“在每个成功男人之后……”，我再次感谢MSA的这一巨大荣誉我对此表示感谢。