Jackson School Geodynamicist Joins German Academy of Sciences
- May 14, 2026
[Editor's Note: This story is part of a Texas Global series celebrating UT Austin faculty members whose work has received international honors or awards.]
Professor Thorsten Becker from The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences has been elected a member of the German Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina, one of the oldest and most prestigious academies of science in the world.
A professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) and a faculty associate at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, Becker joins the German academy as only one of three geodynamicists to be elected to the organization during its 400-year history. His diverse research portfolio includes studying the dynamics of the lithosphere and mantle system, present-day plate tectonics and planetary evolution.
“It is a great honor to be elected to Leopoldina and join a select group of geodynamicists,” said Becker. “I take this as a much-welcome recognition of our team efforts, the support of many friends and colleagues, and the appreciation of the importance of solid Earth system science more generally.”
Recently, Becker was part of the team that discovered that the underside of the North American Continent is dripping, a process called “cratonic thinning” that has never been captured in action before. Becker also helped researchers understand the role the Earth’s mantle played in the formation of a large land bridge in the Arabian Peninsula that connected Asia and Africa 20 million years ago and played a pivotal role in human evolution.
Becker works with numerous international collaborators to understand large earthquakes, including the Megathrust Modeling Framework, with the goal of one day using supercomputers to potentially assess the likelihood of earthquakes.
Demian Saffer, the director of UTIG, praised Becker’s exceptional contributions to the institute and the international impact of his research.
“Election to the German Academy is a tremendous honor, and a deeply deserved recognition of Thorsten’s work in driving the field of geophysics forward, particularly in bringing increasingly computational and quantitative approaches to problems in geodynamics and tectonics,” Saffer said.
The German Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina, was founded in 1652 in Schweinfurt/Germany and has elected world-famous scientists such as Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and others to its organization. Leopoldina is the oldest continuously existing academy of natural sciences and medicine in the world and provides policymakers and communities around the world with science-based advice for decision making.
Read the full story on the Jackson School of Geosciences website.
