Janet Watson

Janet Vida Watson (1923 to 1985) was a British geologist, professor of geology at Imperial College and in 1982 the first woman elected president of the Geological Society of London. She was a rapporteur for the International Geological Correlation Program from 1977 to 1982 and a vice president of the Royal Society in 1983 and 1984. Born in Hampstead to the palaeontologist David Watson and the embryologist Katharine Parker, she studied general science at Reading, then geology at Imperial College, graduating with first class honours in 1947. After mapping in the Scottish Highlands in 1946 she began doctoral work on the Lewisian complex of north-west Scotland, first on the migmatites of Sutherland under Herbert Harold Read, working alongside John Sutton, whom she married in 1949. Their joint 1951 paper had a major effect on the study of Precambrian basement complexes by showing that their metamorphic and structural history could be read as a series of discrete orogenic events. She is well known for her understanding of the Lewisian complex and for books such as Beginning Geology and Introduction to Geology.