John Graham Ramsay

John Graham Ramsay (17 June 1931 – 12 January 2021) was a British structural geologist who was a professor at Imperial College London, the University of Leeds and the University of Zurich.

Career Born in Edmonton, suburban London, in 1931, John Graham Ramsay took his bachelor's degree in geology at the Imperial College of Science and Technology (Imperial), University of London graduating with first class honours in 1952 with Dr John Sutton as his mentor. He did his doctoral work in the Loch Monar area of the Scottish Highlands working on the strain patterns seen in intensely deformed and repeatedly folded rocks of the Moine Series and the relationships seen between folded basement and its cover rocks obtaining a PhD in 1954.

After undertaking military service as a musician (cellist and tenor drummer) in the Corps of the Royal Engineers of Great Britain, he was appointed to a teaching position at the Geology department of Imperial in 1957. Many of his early fundamental research papers were written whilst at Imperial where he became Professor of structural geology in 1966. In the following year he published his first book, Folding and Fracturing of Rocks, which gained him attention in structural geology. He went on to win awards in his field

From 1973 to 1976 he was professor and head of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Leeds. In 1976, he was appointed a professor of geology at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (and University of Zürich), Switzerland; a post he held until he retired in 1992. and held Honorary Fellowships of the Geological Society of America, the Société Géologique de France, the Indian National Science Academy, the American Geophysical Union, and the US National Academy of Sciences.

Awards 1973 Bigsby Medal 1986 Wollaston Medal 1992 Arthur Holmes Medal

Family Ramsay was married to Dorothee. They retired to the village of Issirac in the Ardeche, France. Ramsay died in Zurich, Switzerland on 12 January 2021, aged 89.