Dal Swaine Award Certificate and Award-Winning Monograph

Recently, Professor Dai Shifeng from our university received a letter from Professor Magdalena Misz-Kennan, Vice President/President-Elect of the International Organization for Organic Petrology and a professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, congratulating him and his international research team on winning the Dal Swaine Award.

The international Dal Swaine Award is named after the renowned Australian energy geologist Dal Swaine, who made outstanding contributions to the fields of coal geochemistry and environmental geochemistry. The award honors papers or monographs that have made significant contributions to the geochemistry and mineralogy of coal and hydrocarbon source rocks. Typically, only one research achievement is recognized with the Dal Swaine Award each year. The international research team led by Professor Dai Shifeng, including Professor Robert B. Finkelman from the University of Texas at Dallas, Professor James C. Hower from the University of Kentucky, Professor David French and Dr. Ian Graham from the University of New South Wales in Australia, and Professor Zhao Lei from our university, co-authored the monograph "Inorganic Geochemistry of Coal" (Elsevier, 2023), which won the 2024 Dal Swaine Award.

It is reported that this monograph is the first international English monograph on the inorganic geochemistry of coal since Dal Swaine published "Trace Elements in Coal" in 1990. Professor Maria Mastalerz from Indiana University and the Indiana Geological and Water Survey wrote a book review, praising the monograph as "a very timely publication that will undoubtedly become a primary reference for researchers working on coal and organic matter. The book is very comprehensive: it contains crucial data, perfectly presented summary tables, provides key critiques, and offers suggestions for future research. At the same time, it is also very engaging and easy to read."

This is the second time that Professor Dai Shifeng's international research team, with him as the primary contributor, has won the Dal Swaine Award. Additionally, the paper "End-Permian terrestrial ecosystem collapse in North China: Evidence from palynology and geochemistry" by the team led by Professors Shao Longyi and Lu Jing from our university (with Dr. Zhang Peixin as the first author) also won the 2024 Dal Swaine Award. With both awards in 2024 going to research teams from our university, it fully demonstrates the strength and international influence of our research teams in the field of coal geology.