Sharon Mosher

She brought new life to two major geological associations as the president of the Geological Society of America in 2000-2001, establishing new programs and sound fiscal management, and the American Geosciences Institute in 2012-2013. In the early 2000’s, she recognized the importance of transitioning geoscientific society journals from paper to electronic and aggregating them and led a small group of geoscientific societies to found GeoScienceWorld, an international journal aggregation for geoscientists. She served as Chair of the Board until 2009. As a longtime board member of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, serving as Chair in 2004, she became a strong advocate for science in public policy. From 2013 to 2023, she spearheaded National Science Foundation sponsored initiatives on the Future of Undergraduate Geoscience Education and Shaping the Future of Graduate Geoscience Education, which led to changes in geoscience curriculum across the country that better prepares students for the future workforce.

Among her awards and honors, she is a fellow of the Geological Society of America, from which she received the Distinguished Service Award in 2003, and an honorary fellow of the Geological Society of London. In 2022 she was awarded the William B. Heroy Jr. Award for Distinguished Service to American Geoscience Institute, and in 2021 the Council of Scientific Societies Visionary Leadership Award. In 1990 she was named Outstanding Educator by the Association for Women Geoscientists. She received the 2016 Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Illinois College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, her alma mater. In 2020 she was given a lifetime achievement award as the Marcus Milling Legendary Geoscientist by the American Geoscience Institute for all her achievements in Earth Sciences. In 2023 she was inducted into the Jackson School of Geosciences Hall of Distinction.

Research

Her primary research interests are in the evolution of complexly deformed terranes, strain analysis, deformation mechanisms, and the interaction between chemical and physical processes during deformation.

Mosher's research involves structural petrology and field-oriented structural geology. She created and tested a new model for the Precambrian collisional orogen along the southern margin of Laurentia, with specific emphasis the Llano uplift of central Texas and on the Sierra Diablo foothills of west Texas. Dr. Mosher made great advancements in the study of plate tectonics, changing the way of thinking of many in this field by showing plate tectonics was already active in the Mesoproterozoic. Traditionally, Mesoproterozoic mountain belts have been thought of as lacking of ophiolites, high and ultra high pressure metamorphic rocks, elements needed to establish subduction, but through her and her research group’s work, Dr. Mosher has proven this not to be the case. She also studied the evolution of the Macquarie Ridge Complex, the Pacific-Australian plate boundary south of New Zealand, exploring how strain was partitioned during the boundary’s evolution from a spreading center to a transform plate boundary, the processes that allowed the deformation, and the discontinuation of magmatism. Macquarie ridge is unique as part of the ocean floor has been uplifted in place on Macquarie Island allowing it to be studied on land. Another of her research projects focused on the partitioning of different types of strain during formation of ductile non-coaxial shear zones in both extensional and contractional environments, including the development of corrugations in metamorphic core complexes and the formation of rods and mullions in thrust nappes. For her Ph.D. research, she showed that the Purgatory Conglomerate in Rhode Island was only deformed by pressure solution, demonstrating for the first time the importance pressure solution as a deformation mechanism and quantifying its effects. In her early career, her research group’s work on the Narragansett Basin of Rhode Island and surrounding areas documented the effects of high-grade metamorphism, complex ductile deformation and granite intrusions, demonstrating for the first time that the Pennsylvanian-aged Alleghenian Orogeny also affected southeastern New England during the final closure of the Atlantic Ocean to form Pangea.