Professor Chris Hawkesworth

Honorary Fellow

Professor Chris Hawkesworth (1970, Geology) was born in Khartoum and brought up in Ireland. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin in 1970, and then went on to study at St Edmund Hall, supervised by Ron Oxburgh and receiving his DPhil in 1974. He held positions at the Open University and the University of Bristol before holding the Wardlaw Chair of Earth Sciences and the position of Deputy Principal and Vice-Principal of Research at the University of St Andrews until 2014.

Chris has served on the editorial boards of a number of academic journals, including reviewing editor for Science, and more recently on a number of working groups and the Research and Knowledge Exchange Committee of the Scottish Funding Council. While at St Andrews he coordinated the submission to the Research Excellence Framework across all subjects. Currently, Chris holds Emeritus positions at the Universities of Bristol and St Andrews.

Chris’s research career has been concerned with the extent to which rates of natural processes can be determined from the geological record. He is an isotope and trace element geochemist, and he has worked in areas that include the generation of magmas in different tectonic settings, the origins of associated base metal deposits, and the processes that have shaped the generation and evolution of the continental crust. The geological record is far from complete and it is biased by tectonics and by erosion and sedimentation. He uses in situ analyses to investigate changes in igneous processes recorded in zoned minerals, and tiny mineral inclusions trapped within them. This provides new insights into the composition of new continental crust and how that has changed with time, and the magmatic and hydrothermal processes involved in the development of mineralization associated with the emplacement of granites. Other research interests include the application of radiogenic isotopes in archaeology and stable metal isotopes in biomedicine.