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Maarten de Wit was born in Holland, educated in Ireland and, "armed" with a Shell scholarship, obtained his PhD in structural geology and tectonics at Cambridge University, UK. He has worked as postdoctoral research fellow at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University; as an UNDP-expert in Ethiopia; and as a senior researcher at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa. He has held long-term visiting posts at Queens University, Canada (where he was awarded an honorary DSc); Imperial College, London; MIT; University of Utrecht, Holland. He has carried out extensive field work
in North and South America, Antarctica and throughout Africa. |
Maarten de Wit - Scientific
Director
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His research interests in "How the
Earth works", include a variety of topics around the theme of global
tectonics, including the evolution of Gondwanaland, the origin of continents
and hydrothermal systems in the early Earth; and the modern tectonic
evolution of Africa and its relationship to climate and biology. He has also
written extensively on science policy and resource economics, with an
emphasis on Africa and Antarctica. He currently occupies the Phillipson Stow
Chair in Geology and Mineralogy at the University of Cape Town, South Africa;
and he is the founding director of CIGCES (Centre
for Graphical Computing of Earth Systems) at UCT. In AEON he will
continue to study the origin and evolution of the African lithosphere and its
mineral resources and will be AEON’s
first Scientific Director. |
