The DMG awards the Doris Schachner Medal to Roland Stalder in recognition of his outstanding and long-standing contributions to the promotion of mineralogy. For more than two decades, he has been tirelessly committed to public outreach, with a particular focus on schools. Through a continuous stream of innovative ideas, he has introduced school students to the natural sciences and mineralogy from an early stage.
Roland Stalder studied mineralogy at the University of Göttingen from 1989 to 1994, supported by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation from 1992 onwards. He completed his diploma thesis on experimental investigations of non-stoichiometric spinels. For his doctoral research, he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz (1994–1996) and subsequently to the Institute of Mineralogy at Goethe University Frankfurt (1996–1997), where he completed his dissertation, supervised by S. Foley and G. Brey, on the experimental partitioning of trace elements between solid and fluid phases under upper mantle conditions.
He continued this line of research throughout his scientific career, focusing particularly on the incorporation of water and chlorine into nominally anhydrous upper mantle minerals and their influence on physical properties. Following his PhD, he held postdoctoral positions at the Institute of Mineralogy and Petrology at ETH Zurich (1997–2000) and the Department of Mineralogy at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm (2001–2002). He then spent six years as Junior Professor of Experimental Petrology at the University of Göttingen.
In 2008, Roland Stalder was appointed Professor of Mineralogy and Petrology at the University of Innsbruck, where he continues to serve today. He is an Associate Editor of both the European Journal of Mineralogy and American Mineralogist and acts as a reviewer for numerous international journals, including Contributions to Mineralogy and Petrology, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, and Earth and Planetary Science Letters. He is also an active member of several mineralogical, geochemical, and geophysical societies.
Alongside his successful scientific career, Roland Stalder has devoted many years to science outreach and education. While the exact beginning of this commitment is difficult to pinpoint, colleagues have long recognized his exceptional dedication to communicating geoscience to children and young people. During his time in Göttingen, he designed the mineral card game Building Blocks of the Earth, which was first printed in 2005 with the support of sponsors. In 2008, he made the design available to the DMG, which has since reprinted the game several times due to its popularity. In 2011, with Roland Stalder's active involvement, the DMG published a second mineral card game, Ores. Both editions have become among the Society's most popular educational materials.
Within the DMG, Roland Stalder played a central role in the Commission for Higher Education, serving as its chair from 2008 to 2018. During his ten-year tenure, he successfully transformed the commission into the Working Group for Schools and Universities, a change formally recognized during the DMG Annual Meeting in Rimini (EMC2016).
As chair of the working group, he established a network of more than 30 collaborators to develop the Mineralogical Teaching Kit (MiLeKo), an educational resource containing experiments and teaching specimens for use in schools. Developing these materials required a major collaborative effort aimed at attracting future students while bringing mineralogical topics into society. His activities also included public engagement, media appearances, teacher training workshops, including those organized by the Thuringian Ministry of Education, and participation in conferences of the German Association for Mathematics and Science Education (MNU). To realize the MiLeKo project, Roland Stalder secured financial support from the Tutzek Foundation. His extraordinary commitment culminated in the first MiLeKo Workshop in 2018.
By awarding the Doris Schachner Medal, the German Mineralogical Society honors Roland Stalder as an individual who has worked tirelessly and with remarkable success to increase the visibility of the mineralogical sciences.
— Heidi Höfer · Frankfurt/Main
