John Murray (oceanographer)

Sir John Murray (1841 to 1914) was a Canadian-born British oceanographer, marine biologist and limnologist, often called the father of modern oceanography. Born at Cobourg in Canada West to parents from Scotland, he moved to Stirling as a teenager and studied at the University of Edinburgh, where he took geology under Archibald Geikie. After a whaling voyage to Spitsbergen as ship surgeon in 1868 he joined the Challenger Expedition as a naturalist, collecting marine samples and improving instruments during the four year voyage. He became director of the Challenger Office in Edinburgh after Charles Wyville Thomson died in 1882 and oversaw publication of the Report on the Scientific Results of the Voyage of HMS Challenger, a work of more than fifty volumes.