Kilham Memorial Lecture
Rules | Committee | Recipients
The Peter Kilham Memorial Fund was established by Susan Soltau Kilham to perpetuate the memory of her husband. The triennial Kilham Lecture is awarded to individuals that aspire to his innovative ideas and research. Peter Kilham (1943-1989) was born at Salisbury in England and lived as a child in Uganda. Most of his early years, however, were passed around Hanover, New Hampshire, USA, where he received his introduction to research at Dartmouth College and his A.B. with high honors in biology in 1965. He completed the Ph.D. in zoology at Duke University in 1972 for research on the chemistry and biology of tropical African lakes. He also conducted research at the Marine Biological Laboratory and Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, and the Max-Planck-Institut für Limnologie, Plön. Most of his professional life was spent at the University of Michigan, where he was Professor of Biology and Research Scientist in the Center for Great Lakes and Aquatic Sciences when he died while conducting research at Kisumu, Kenya.
His keen intuition enabled Kilham to see lakes in an imaginative new light. He shared his insights generously with others, and engaged in mutualistic collaboration with many colleagues, notably Robert Hecky, David Tilman, and his wife Susan Soltau Kilham. He was a prodigious field worker, who was content to spend months at a time studying African lakes accompanied only by a local field assistant with whom his most effective common language was KiSwahili.
D. A. Livingstone
Duke University
References
Livingstone, D. A., 1989. In Memoriam: Peter Kilham - 1943-1989. Limnology and Oceanography 34(5):967.
Melack, J. M., 1993. Preface (unnumbered) and Bibliography of Peter Kilham. pp. 707-708. In: Peter Kilham Commemorative Issue of Limnology and Oceanography 38(3).
Rules for the Administration of the Peter Kilham Memorial Lecture
§ 1. The Peter Kilham Memorial Lecture is administered by the Kilham Memorial Committee according to the following rules adopted by the International Association of Theoretical and Applied Limnology (SIL).
§ 2. The aim of the Kilham Memorial Committee is to honor the memory of Peter Kilham by promoting and stimulating research in the subjects that most interested him and to which he devoted his life.
§ 3. The Peter Kilham Memorial Fund, Inc. will supply SIL with a prize of $1,000 US prior to each triennial congress to be presented to the person chosen as the Kilham Memorial Lecturer. The subject of the lecture will be in one of more of the following areas: African limnology, biogeochemistry, ecology and physiology of planktonic diatoms, comparative ecology of lakes and oceans, paleolimnology, or saline lakes.
§ 4. The selection of the Kilham Memorial Lecturer shall be decided by the Kilham Memorial Committee. The nomination should be announced, if possible, at the congress next before that at which the lecture is to be delivered.
§ 5. The Kilham Memorial Committee shall consist of five members, two of which shall be the President and General Secretary of SIL (who shall act respectively as the Chair and Secretary of the Committee), one member (who must be a member of SIL) shall be named by the Peter Kilham Memorial fund, Inc., and two members will be elected by the International Committee. Preference for elected members shall be given to prior Kilham Memorial Lecturers. Re-election of members is permissible.
§ 6. The Committee shall decide by vote, three members forming a quorum. If the voting is exactly even, the Chair shall have a casting vote. Voting may be by correspondence.
R. E. Hecky (1992)
W. D. Williams (1995)
D. A. Livingstone (1998)
J. M. Melack (2001)
Dag Hessen (2004)
Kevin Rogers (2007)