Andrew Lawson

Andrew Cowper Lawson (1861 to 1952) was a Scots-born Canadian geologist who became professor of geology at the University of California, Berkeley. Born at Anstruther in Scotland, he moved with his parents to Hamilton, Ontario at age six, took his first degree at the University of Toronto in 1883 and his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in 1888, and worked for the Geological Survey of Canada before leaving for Berkeley in 1890. He was the first person to identify and name the San Andreas Fault in 1895 and, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the first to delineate its entire length. He edited and co-authored the 1908 report on that earthquake, known as the Lawson Report, and named the Franciscan Complex. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1924 and was president of the Geological Society of America in 1926.