Robert D. Hatcher

Robert D. Hatcher is an American structural geologist, born in 1940, regarded as one of the world leading authorities on the geology of the southern and central Appalachian Mountains, who held positions at Clemson University, Florida State University, the University of South Carolina and finally the University of Tennessee, Knoxville with Oak Ridge National Laboratory before retiring as professor emeritus in 2018. His research applied plate tectonic reassessment and terrane analysis to Appalachian geology, using seismic profiling from the Consortium for Continental Reflection Profiling to demonstrate that the Blue Ridge Mountains form a tectonic sheet displaced roughly two hundred kilometers from its origin. He served as co-editor-in-chief of the Geological Society of America Bulletin from 1981 to 1988, president of the Geological Society of America in 1993 and president of the American Geosciences Institute in 1996, and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1989. He received the Penrose Medal in 2006.