Francis John Pettijohn

Francis John Pettijohn was an American geologist born June 20, 1904, who died April 23, 1999, and who held positions at the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1952, becoming full professor in 1949, and then at Johns Hopkins University from 1952 until his retirement in 1973. He specialized in sedimentology, publishing an important 1943 work on Archean sedimentation and authoring several influential texts on sedimentary rocks and paleocurrents. He received the Wollaston Medal in 1974, the Penrose Medal in 1975, the Twenhofel Medal of the Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists, and the Sorby Medal of the International Association of Sedimentologists, and the Society for Sedimentary Geology created the Francis J. Pettijohn Medal in his honor in 1992.