Awarded the Ritter Memorial Fellowship

The DSM was delighted to hear the news that environmental historian Dr Katrin Kleemann has been awarded the prestigious Ritter Memorial Fellowship.

The Ritter Memorial Fellowship is an international research fellowship that promotes research in the field of the history of marine sciences. The fellowship is named in honour of the founder and first director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, William E. Ritter, and his wife, Mary Bennett Ritter. Kleemann is the 18th Ritter Fellow at Scripps.

This honour is awarded every two years by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to historians or scientists from other disciplines whose research broadens and deepens the understanding of the history of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences.

The founding of Scripps is often attributed to the courage and determination of Ritter, whose motto was "neglect nothing". When he founded Scripps in 1903, he was a professor of zoology at the University of California at Berkeley. Ritter advocated a balanced and holistic view of nature, based on a deep interest in philosophy, biology, physics and mathematics. He was inspired, as he put it, "by the vast scale on which things happen in the ocean and the literally infinite complexity of cause and law at work there".

The Ritter Memorial Fellowship consists of research funding for the continued pursuit of academic excellence and an honorarium. During the term, the fellow will collaborate with Scripps scholars and historians and give lectures to the academic community and the public.

In practical terms, the fellowship provides Dr Katrin Kleemann with a budget of USD 30,000, which she can use for her research and a stay at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego in La Jolla, California. In the first half of 2025, she will be travelling to San Diego for six months to conduct research at Scripps University. She plans to give three lectures, network with researchers and offer a workshop.