Europlanet Lifetime Achievement Medal
The Europlanet Lifetime Achievement Medal, launched in 2025, is awarded annually to honour outstanding contributions in scientific excellence, community building, and outreach from individuals up to a scientific age* of more than 22 years. The Lifetime Achievement Medal comes with a plaque and a registration waiver for the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC). Recipients are invited to give a medal lecture at EPSC.
* The scientific age of a researcher at time of submission, which is calculated from the year of the last degree in scientific education (MSc, PhD) without counting the time being on leave (parental [+ 1 year/child] / health [variable]) or time working primarily outside science.
Recipients of the Europlanet Lifetime Achievement Medal
2026
It is with great pleasure that we award the Europlanet Lifetime Achievement Medal 2026 to Emeritus Professor Agustín Sánchez-Lavega, an outstanding and world known expert in the field of meteorology and dynamics of planetary atmospheres. The scope of Prof. Sánchez-Lavega’s interests and successful research encompasses the dynamics of the atmospheres of Venus and Mars, extending to the giant planets and exoplanets. His work always demonstrates a favourable synergy and balance of observations, numerical modelling and theoretical assessments. He has provided crucial support to several planetary missions of ESA and NASA (Venus Express, Mars-2020, JUICE, Mars-Express) and particular achievements of Prof. Sánchez-Lavega are related to the observations and analysis of the cloud structure, morphology and a variety of dynamical phenomena in the atmospheres of Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. He revealed in particular the peculiar dynamics of major convective storms on Jupiter and Saturn, as Saturn’s Great White Spot planetary-scale disturbance. He has studied in detail the atmospheric circulation and wind structure of Venus, Jupiter and Saturn.
Prof. Sánchez-Lavega has provided great and highly appreciated services to the science community. He has served as a member of the Solar System Working Group of the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Spanish National Astronomical Committee, as a manager of the Spanish National Astronomy and Astrophysics Research Program, and as a member of the Scientific Committee for the European Extremely Large Telescope (ESO). He has been deeply engaged in Europlanet activities. He contributed to establishing a fruitful Spanish community of planetary science that later integrated into the Europlanet Society Hub for Spain and Portugal, and he participated in the Europlanet 2020 and 2024 RI projects where he focused his activities on developing synergies with amateur astronomers around the world.
In addition to his scientific achievements, Prof. Sánchez-Lavega has provided a remarkable contribution to university education and teaching. For the entire duration of his career he taught courses on Planetary Atmospheres, Astronomy and Astrophysics and optical detectors at different universities, being founder and promoter of the Space Classroom and the Master’s degree in Space Science and Technology at the University of the Basque Country, which has produced more than 300 graduates. He is author of the University textbook “An Introduction to Planetary Atmospheres”, a second edition of which is currently in preparation. By teaching and training young researchers, Prof. Sánchez-Lavega significantly contributed to building a new generation of planetary scientists in Europe and Spain. His remarkable lifetime achievements in scientific research, university teaching and mentoring, service to the science community and public outreach make him an outstanding planetary and atmospheric scientist who has shaped this field in Europe during the last 40 years. For all these reasons the Europlanet Society is proud to award the Lifetime Achievement Medal to Professor Agustín Sánchez-Lavega.
2025
It is with the deepest admiration and respect that we award the Europlanet Lifetime Achievement Medal 2025 to Professor Jean Schneider: an ”architect” of modern planetary sciences. His remarkable career is a testament to the power of foresight, a journey defined by research that can only be described as pioneering, visionary, and of profound, revolutionary impact.
Long before the first exoplanet crossed its star, Professor Schneider was already charting the course for their discovery. In 1988, nearly a decade before the field would be transformed by observation, he laid the essential theoretical groundwork for identifying exoplanets through transit photometry. This seminal work became the very foundation upon which the great voyages of discovery — CoRoT, Kepler, and TESS — were built, leading to the detection of thousands of new worlds. It was his intellectual leadership that helped shape the CoRoT mission itself, guiding it to become the first space telescope dedicated to the transit method and culminating in the historic discovery of CoRoT-7b, the first super-Earth with a measured radius.
But his vision did not stop at single stars. In the early 1990s, a full two decades before the first confirmed discoveries, he demonstrated the feasibility of detecting planets in binary star systems, foreseeing the existence of circumbinary worlds that would once have been confined to science fiction. Perhaps his most audacious and impactful vision came in 1994, when he published the first-ever work on the feasibility of detecting atmospheric absorption lines on extrasolar planets — the method we now know as transmission spectroscopy. At a time when not a single transiting exoplanet had yet been found, he was already designing the tools to search for oxygen in their atmospheres, asking the ultimate question of habitability before we even knew where to look.
Professor Schneider’s contributions extend from the purely theoretical to the profoundly practical. In 1995, immediately following the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, he created the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia. This was not merely a catalog; it was a foundational public utility for a burgeoning field. Cited in thousands of papers, it has become an indispensable cornerstone for research, teaching, and public outreach across the globe. Furthermore, he pioneered the methodology for detecting exomoons, once again pushing the frontiers of what we believe is possible to observe.
Throughout his career, Professor Schneider has been a guiding force and a leader within the scientific community. From heading special actions at CNRS to co-chairing working groups at ESO and serving on the steering committee of the IAU, he has tirelessly worked to build the international collaborations and institutional frameworks necessary for scientific progress in the field of planetary sciences. His is a mind of remarkable intellectual breadth, ranging from particle physics to relativistic astrophysics, and from exobiology to epistemology, leaving a trail of significant results in every field he has explored.
For a lifetime of seeing the future before it arrived, for laying the theoretical foundations that enabled a generation of discoveries, and for building the tools and the community that sustain our quest for knowledge about exoplanets, the Europlanet Society is proud to award the Lifetime Achievement Medal to Professor Jean Schneider.
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