Andrew Lawson

Andrew Cowper Lawson ( born July 25, 1861 in Anstruther, Scotland, † June 16, 1952 in Berkeley, California ) was a professor of geology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the first person identified in the San Francisco Bay Area, the San Andreas Fault in 1895. He coined the name, and he was after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 the first openly put their entire length, although he never fully realized their nature. He examined and named as the Franciscan Complex, a 1,000 -kilometer-long, strong zerschuppte rock sequence of a former accretionary prism, which builds the American west coast of Oregon in the north to Southern California. He was editor and co-author of the 1908 published report on the San Francisco earthquake, which was known as the " Carnegie " or " Lawson Report".

Lawson moved at the age of six with his parents to Hamilton, Ontario. In 1883 he laid the B. A. in natural sciences at the University of Toronto from the MA he received in 1885. During his studies he worked for the Geological Survey of Canada. The Ph.D. he made in 1888 at Johns Hopkins University.

In 1890 he left the Geological Survey of Canada, to work as a consulting geologist in Vancouver. In October of the same year he accepted a position as assistant professor of mineralogy and geology at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1892 he got a full professorship, which he held until 1928. As Professor Emeritus Lawson was a consulting geologist in the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in the 1930s.

His house in the area called La Loma Park in the Berkeley Hills in Berkeley, California, today, " Lawson House " or " Fault Line Villa ", specifically designed as earthquake-proof building for him by the architect Bernard Maybeck. The house is a sight officially designated today.

1938 Lawson was awarded the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America. The mineral lawsonite is named after him.