Support for grad students – apply for the Raskin Scholarship: esipfed.org/raskin
ESIP Celebrates 2025 Award Winners

Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) celebrates the 2025 award winners who step up as excellent data stewards, community organizers and enthusiastic volunteers. They do the work, build community, and go above and beyond.
2025 ESIP Award Winners
Each year, the ESIP community recognizes the outstanding accomplishments, achievements and service of individuals spanning the Earth sciences, geoinformatics, data and computing. The awards are presented during the closing plenary at the 2025 January ESIP Meeting.
“Our awards seek to honor the people in the Earth science data community who go above and beyond,” said Susan Shingledecker, executive director of ESIP. “Their sustained leadership and involvement speaks to the essence of ESIP. We are a volunteer community and people’s generous offerings of their professional expertise and time is what fuels us.”

Upcoming ESIP Awards
We celebrate our amazing community all year long. From FUNding Friday to our Community Fellows, we make sure to offer opportunities for growth, recognition and novel ideas.
Our next award will be for graduate students seeking to build bridges between the Earth sciences and data science. Learn more about the Raskin Scholarship: esipfed.org/raskin
And stay up to date on all awards, funding opportunities, events and celebrations through the weekly ESIP Update: esipfed.org/subscribe
Martha E. Maiden Award Honors Lifetime Achievement

Named for Martha E. Maiden, program executive for Earth Science Data Systems at NASA, the award honors individuals who have demonstrated leadership, dedication and a collaborative spirit in advancing the field of Earth science information.
This year, the award goes to Karl Benedict. As his nominator Matt Jones from DataONE wrote, the Earth science data community “thrives when people give generously of their time and expertise to work collaboratively on challenges and solutions in information science. Throughout his career, Karl Benedict has personified this spirit of generous giving.”
Recently retired from the University of New Mexico, Karl worked for nearly 40 years across disciplines as a field archaeologist and data manager, research scientist and geospatial application developer, applied research center director, and most recently, as the Director of the UNM Library’s Research Data Services and IT programs. Read the UNM news release about Karl's work and award.
“The common thread across all of this work has been my enthusiasm for shared problem solving around data discovery, integration, analysis, discovery, sharing and preservation,” said Karl, a self-described geospatial data geek who has served in multiple ESIP leadership roles, including being President twice from 2012-2014 and 2019-2020.
Nancy Hoebelheinrich from Knowledge Motifs LLC, another longstanding ESIP leader and one of Karl’s nominators, wrote, “Karl is both a leader and collaborator who cheerfully and generously contributes to group activities with a focus on crafting practical solutions to community-agreed-upon problems with managing and supporting the research and data lifecycles.”
What I do: Work with research collaborators like archaeologists, natural resource managers, public health experts, atmospheric modelers, economists, linguists, biologists and geographers.
Why I do it: Technophilia – enjoying the development of longstanding collaborations at the intersection of data and technology.
Karl Benedict
The President’s Award Honors Service

Selected by the ESIP President, this award recognizes a participant who has made significant, tangible contributions to ESIP.
ESIP President Denise Hills announced the award winner: Mark Parsons, who has led the research and community outreach to develop the new ESIP strategic themes for 2026-2030.
“ESIP is in an exciting place where the evolution of tools and data, as well as our new mission and vision, call for a new set of strategies ,” said Hills, Project Manager at Advanced Resources International. “Mark stepped up to lead community-driven strategy. For the last year, he has organized and distilled complex discussions into keen observations.”
Mark is recently retired, but has continued to participate in ESIP and other Earth science data communities. He recorded an interview through the History of the People of ESIP (HOPE) project about his work in July 2024.
What I do: Retired from a career of building communities, trust, and standards around data, because community, trust, and standards make data work.
Why I do it: ESIP is a great place to do all that. Also, for some reason data citation gets me excited.
Mark Parsons
Action is Inspired by Catalyst Awardees

Given to participants who have brought about positive change in ESIP by inspiring other members to take action, this award recognizes exceptional volunteer efforts.
The Catalyst Award winner, Carolina Berys has led collaborations in the Marine Data Cluster and the new Data Sovereignty Cluster, including efforts to span semantics, data standards and schema.org projects.
“Collaboration is inherently done within a group, but there are often individuals who provide momentum,” Hills said, who also selects the Catalyst Award as ESIP President. “Carolina is one of those people who encourages conversation and seeks out connection. Her work this past year to bring together so many Collaboration Areas is admirable.”
What I do: I manage oceanographic data and facilitate collaboration on advancing marine data management practices.
Why I do it: To preserve vital knowledge about our oceans, ensuring it supports current and future research.
Carolina Berys
Falkenberg Award

The Charles S. Falkenberg Award is a joint award through the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP). The award recognizes an early to mid-career scientist who has contributed to the quality of life, economic opportunities and stewardship of the planet through the use of Earth science information and to the public awareness of the importance of understanding our planet.
Presented to Xiuquan (Xander) Wang from the University of Prince Edward Island, the award is part of the AGU Annual Meeting Awards Ceremony. Wang will present at the 2025 July ESIP Meeting in Seattle, Washington.
What I do: My work aims to raise public awareness of climate change and promote community-based climate actions through the advancement of Earth science informatics.
Why I do it: Community-based climate actions are urgently needed to help increase our societal resilience to climate change and build a climate-smart future for many generations to come.
Xiuquan (Xander) Wang
Collaboration of the Year Award

This award, selected by the Partnership Committee, honors an ESIP collaboration that exemplifies the spirit of ESIP in one or more areas, through the sharing of a success story. The committee defines a collaboration as two or more individuals or groups working together, and the joint effort does not need to be a formal collaboration.
The Information Quality Cluster (IQC) is the first recipient of the Collaboration of the Year.
IQC is a powerful example of collaboration that spans disciplines and time zones. Through tapping into networks and organizations around the world, the IQC volunteers have laid down strong foundational work in setting and defining Earth science data standards.
The cluster’s leadership team includes Zhong Liu, Ge Peng, Bob Downs, Yaxing Wei, Hampapuram Ramapriyan (Rama) and David Moroni.
What we do: Bring together domain experts across organizations and disciplines to assess Earth science data quality, establish standards for global adoption, and develop FAIR quality frameworks.
Why we do it: Baseline standards foster collaboration across agencies and international organizations and maximize the use of Earth science data for climate change studies and Earth science applications.
Information Quality Cluster
This post was written by Allison Mills with edits from all the award winners and communications staff at their home institutions.
ESIP stands for Earth Science Information Partners and is a community of partner organizations and volunteers. We work together to meet environmental data challenges and look for opportunities to expand, improve, and innovate across Earth science disciplines.
Learn more esipfed.org/get-involved and sign up for the weekly ESIP Update for #EarthScienceData events, funding, webinars and ESIP announcements.