| Citation | In September, 1979, O'Nions took up his appointment as Royal Society Research Professor, held in the Department of Mineralogy and Petrology at Cambridge. Previously he had been professor of geology at the Lamont-Dohery Geological Observatory of Columbia University. O'Nions is a distinguished isotope geochemist and his work covers a broad range of geochemical fields. His strontium isotopic and rare earth studies and his pioneering work on the neodymium-samarium method and its application to rock systems have provided fresh insight towards several critical aspects of the early evolution of the Earth and related cosmochemical phenomena. In 1979 O'Nions received the J.B. Macelwane award of the American Geophysical Union in recognition of his work. |