Died 22 April 2014 | ||
Françoise Gasse ([fʁɑ̃swaz ɡas]; born 1942; died 22 April 2014) was a French paleobiologist, paleoclimatologist and paleohydrologist, who specialized in the study of lacustrine sediments from ancient lakes from Africa and Asia. Her seminal work allowed the reconstruction of the Quaternary climate throughout Africa and western Asia and the African paleoclimate.
Career
She earned her PhD in geology in 1975 from the University of Paris with a thesis on the evolution of Lake Abhé. Her work became the first continuous dated African Pliocene-Pleistocene diatom record. She entered the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and joined the Hydrology and Isotope Geochemistry lab of the Paris-Sud University in 1986, under the direction of professor Jean-Charles Fontes. She moved to the Centre de Recherche et d’Enseignement de Géosciences de l’Environnement (CEREGE) in 1998.
In 2005 she became the first woman to receive the Vega Medal from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography.
In 2010, she was awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal bestowed by the European Union of Geosciences for her "contribution to the reconstruction of climate variability during the Holocene from continental archives and to a better understanding of climate mechanisms involved during this period."