Irina Artemieva

Irina M. Artemieva is Professor of Geophysics at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel (Germany), Distinguished Professor at the China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), and Distinguished Professor at SinoProbe at the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences (Beijing).

She is the President of the European Geosciences Union (2023-2025), after having served as the Vice-President (2022-2023).

During the student years, she was the university team member in cross-country skiing and sport orienteering, and worked as an official English interpreter at the Olympic Games (Moscow, 1980), the International Geological Congress (Moscow, 1984), and at numerous international scientific conferences in Moscow.

Artemieva graduated from the Physics Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1984, having earned both BSc and MSc degrees in physics.

She received PhD degree in physics and mathematics with a minor in geophysics in 1987 from the Schmidt Institute of Physics of the Earth of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where she later worked as junior, senior and leading scientist.

During the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union followed by financial instability in Russian academic institutions, Artemieva had research contracts with the Schlumberger, Anglo-American, and De Beers companies.

Since 1997 she has also served as consultant to the world-leading diamond exploration companies, and has raised since 2019 significant funding from the Chinese academic agencies.

In 1999-2001, after moving out of Russia, Artemieva was employed as Associate Professor in the Uppsala University, Sweden, followed by her work in EOST of the Strasbourg University, France in 2002.

She was Science Coordinator and Executive Board member of the European Science Foundation EUROPROBE program (1999-2001), which involved about two thousand scientists from across the entire Europe.

Her first-authored paper on the thermal state of the continents from 2001 is one of the highest cited publications on the lithosphere, and her publication record counts mainly high-impact sole- and first-authored papers on key questions in geodynamics and plate tectonics.

A characteristics of these papers is, that they usually integrate an unusually broad suite of complementary methods into the interpretations.

Artemieva was the first to constrain the global digital databases of the continental lithosphere thermal thickness and ages, and to develop and apply methods to evaluate heterogeneity in the thermal state, chemical composition and thickness of the lithosphere on global and regional scales.

In 2003-2004 she worked as Senior Researcher at United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, CA, where she was earlier an annual 3–4 months long visitor since 1995.

As sole principal investigator of academic research projects in geophysics, Artemieva has raised between 2005 and 2018 in open peer-review calls more than 3 million euro (>20 mln dkk) from the Danish Research Council (DFF and FNU), Carlsbergfondet (Denmark), the University of Copenhagen (the Freja and the PhD grants), and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters (the Lehmann Grant).

In 2005 Artemieva got position of Associate Professor in the University of Copenhagen, funded by her personal research grants of 2005-2006 and 2007-2009 of Carlsbergfondet, Denmark.

In 2007, she defended the habilitation thesis in the University of Copenhagen (official referees Professors R. Frei, Sierd Cloetingh, K. Furlong) and was the second person in her institute to receive a doctor scientiarum degree (analogue to habilitation degree in Germany) in geosciences.

Artemieva's research concentrates on the lithosphere structure of the Archean cratons and Precambrian geodynamics, with the time coverage spanning from the Archean Earth to modern collisional tectonics, back-arc basins and oceanic lithosphere.

It covers nearly 4 billion years of the Earth's evolution and various disciplines of geophysical and geochemical research of the lithosphere globally with focus on global and regional structure of the Earth's crust and the lithosphere, lithosphere thickness, thermal and compositional heterogeneity of lithosphere mantle, lithosphere formation and secular evolution, and such diverse topics as lithosphere control on kimberlite magmatism and melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

Artemieva was elected member of Academia Europaea in 2007 and was elected member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2014.

In 2010 Artemieva was one of six winners of the open-call Freja Grant of the University of Copenhagen in Natural Sciences, which gave her permanent academic position (but not tenured, as it does not exist in Denmark).

As sole applicant, she was also highly successful in the winning in 2011-2013 and 2014-2018 open-calls for "Large research grants" from the Danish national funding agencies (FNU and DFF).

When she was elected Fellow of the Geological Society of America in 2012, she was the first person in a Danish university to receive the honour.

In 2021, Artemieva has been awarded a highly prestigious Augustus Love Medal of the European Geosciences Union "for her outstanding research contributions to our understanding of the complex processes that control the evolution, thermal structure, stability, and dynamic topography of the continental lithosphere".

By nomination by the Danish Research Council, she was included in the AcademiaNet - Expert Database for Outstanding Women in Academia.

In 2013 she won the position of Professor of Geophysics in the open call of the University of Copenhagen.

Within the European Geosciences Union (EGU), she served on the EGU Council and EGU Program Committee in 2013-2017 as Geodynamics Division President.

She has been member of the EGU Arthur Holmes and Augustus Love medal committees of the European Geosciences Union.

She was also referee for the Crafoord Prize of the Swedish Academy of Sciences.

In 2022, Artemieva was elected President of the European Geosciences Union, where she served as Vice-President (incoming President) the first year after the election.

She continues as President of the European Geosciences Union in 2023-2025, followed by a year as Vice-President (out-going President).

These highly prestigious grants, which paid 44% financial overheads to her department, included only 1-2 grants annually awarded in geosciences in Denmark, and with her grant for 2014-2018, she was the only geoscientist to win it in Denmark.

In 2019-2020 Artemieva was visiting professor in the Stanford University, CA (USA); her sabbatical stay funded by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters was essentially disturbed by the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Artemieva is Task Force leader in the International Lithosphere Program (2019-2024), Program Officer of the International Heat Flow Commission (2019-2024), chairperson of the Danish National Committee for Lithosphere Research (since 2016), Danish Executive Committee Member of the International Science Council (2018), Danish co-representative of EU "European Plate Observing System" (EPOS) in 2008-2017, and she has taken active role in several large-scale international and U.S. scientific programs, such as SCEC, EARTHSCOPE and CIDER.

Artemieva has served as panel member and panel chair in geosciences in national funding agencies of Sweden, Ireland, France, Portugal; as chair and member of re-accreditation panels in the universities and centers of excellence in Portugal and Croatia, as referee to national funding agencies in about 20 European and American countries, and as referee in assessment of professor and junior academic positions in Sweden, Denmark, U.K. and Canada.

She has published highly cited sole- and first-author research papers in international peer-reviewed journals on global and regional lithosphere research and has been included in the 2020-2022 Stanford lists of the "World 2% most influential scientists".

Artemieva is the author of the research monograph The lithosphere: An interdisciplinary approach, which presents a synthesis of our current state-of-knowledge in lithosphere studies based on a full set of geophysical methods complemented by petrologic and laboratory data on rock properties.

Artemieva has been supervisor and promoter of numerous MSc and PhD students and postdoctoral fellows of at least 8 different nationalities.

Her move in 2020 to the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research (Kiel, Germany) has been also affected by the pandemic.

In 2022 Artemieva was invited by the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences as Distinguished Professor to the SinoProbe National Laboratory, followed by her earlier affiliation since 2019 as Distinguished Professor with the China University of Geosciences (Wuhan).

Artemieva has held leadership positions in large-scale international science organizations and programs.