Powell, Chris

PROFESSOR CHRIS POWELL 1943-2001 Chris completed a BSc with honours at the University of Queensland in 1963 and a PhD at the University of Tasmania in 1967. He joined the School of Earth Sciences at Macquarie as a Lecturer in 1970 after periods as a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University and an Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati in the USA. His early research focussed on the tectonics of the Lachlan Fold Belt and the Himalayas. He taught various undergraduate Structural Geology units, Australian and World Stratigraphy and Field Geology. He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1974 and Associate Professor in 1979. Many Macquarie people will probably remember him for the period 1987 to 1989 when he was Head of the former School of Earth Sciences. Chris left Macquarie to take up a Chair at the University of Western Australia in 1990. During his subsequent career in the west, he established the ARC funded Tectonics Special Research Centre a joint enterprise between the University of Western Australia, Curtin University of Technology and the University of Texas at Austin. The Centre’s mission was the discovery of the supercontinents of which Australia has been a part in the past 3 billion years and the processes that formed them. Under Chris’s direction, the Centre carried out global field-based research in many parts of the world and at the time of his death. the Centre was halfway through its nineyear research program. Chris published widely and was on the Editorial Board of Episodes, Geology, Precambrian Research and The Island Arc. Chris was a member of the Advisory Board of the Research School of Earth Sciences at the Australian National University. He was co-leader of the IGCP (International Geological Correlation Program) 440 on the assembly and break up of Rodinia and the Australian correspondent for IGCP 419 on the Late Neoproterozoic foreland basins of southern Africa. Last year he was awarded the Mawson Medal by the Australian Academy of Science for outstanding contributions to the Earth Sciences in Australia. Chris Powell died on Saturday, 21 July during a flight from South Africa to London en route to a conference in Siberia.