At a festive meeting celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Polish Academy of Arts & Sciences in held in Kraków, Poland on October 18th, Rutgers Geology graduate Prof. Michael A Kaminski (’79) was awarded his membership diploma to the Polish Academy. Prof. Mike is a Micropaleontologist with over 250 publications mostly on the subject of Foraminifera, their ecology, biostratigraphy, and taxonomy. After graduating from Rutgers in 1979, he went on to do a masters degree at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, then a Ph.D in the WHOI/MIT Joint Program in Oceanography, under the supervision of William A. Berggren. Prof. Mike worked in the Earth Sciences Department at University College London, where he was the director of the M.Sc. degree program in Micropaleontology, and since 2010 he is based in the Geosciences Department at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals where he currently holds the position of Distinguished Professor. He has taken part in several IODP expeditions, and has supervised over 60 graduate students, and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the journal “Micropaleontology”.
The theme of the meeting in Kraków was “the world facing new challenges”, and one of the sessions dealt with the subject of Anthropocene climate change. Prof. Mike presented his latest research in a talk entitled “Is the Arabian Gulf becoming too hot to sustain animal life?”. Prof. Mike’s appointment as a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences is an honorary lifetime position.
