OUR FACULTY | “If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” Isaac Newton wrote in 1676.
This kind of legacy of knowledge was on the minds of the former students who gathered last spring to pay tribute to Donald L. Sparks—the Unidel S. Hallock du Pont Chair of Soil and Environmental Chemistry—as he received the Geochemistry Division Medal at the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) annual meeting in Denver, Colorado. A globally recognized leader in soil and environmental chemistry, Sparks joined UD’s Department of Plant and Soil Sciences in 1979, and has since mentored dozens of doctoral students, who have gone on to mentor dozens of their own.
He represents an excellence in mentorship that can be found across the University, having created an exponential wave of education and research that continues to extend across the world. In 2002, he became the first recipient of the University’s Outstanding Doctoral Graduate Student Advising and Mentoring Award.
During the two-and-a-half day symposium in his honor at the ACS meeting, many of his former students presented talks, as did current students and colleagues who have worked with Sparks over the years.
“The highlight of my career has been the advisement and mentoring of a remarkable group of students who have come to UD from all parts of the world,” says Sparks. “It has been highly satisfying to follow their successful careers and the impact they are having in addressing some of the global environmental challenges we face.”
Article by Beth Chajes
