Andrew Cowper Lawson

Andrew Cowper Lawson was a Scots-born Canadian-American geologist born July 25, 1861, in Anstruther, Scotland, who died June 16, 1952, in Alameda County, California, and who was the first person to identify and name the San Andreas Fault, in 1895, later delineating its complete length following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, edited and co-authored the 1908 report on that earthquake known as the Lawson Report, and named the Franciscan Complex. He served as assistant professor of mineralogy and geology at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1890, was promoted to full professor in 1892, and held professor emeritus status from 1928 until his death in 1952. He won the Hayden Memorial Geological Award in 1935, served as president of the Geological Society of America in 1926, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1915, the National Academy of Sciences in 1924 and the American Philosophical Society in 1925, and received the Penrose Medal in 1938.