Barry Voight is an American geologist, volcanologist, author, and engineer. Voight foresaw the collapse of the Mount St. Helens volcano in the state of Washington. He is the uncle of actor Jon Voight and songwriter Chip Taylor.
About Barry Voight in brief
Barry Voight is an American geologist, volcanologist, author, and engineer. Voight foresaw the collapse of the Mount St. Helens volcano in the state of Washington. After earning his Ph. D. at Columbia University, Voight worked as a professor of geology at several universities, including Pennsylvania State University, where he taught from 1964 until his retirement in 2005. He remains an emeritus professor at Penn State and still conducts research, focusing on rock mechanics, plate tectonics, disaster prevention, and geotechnical engineering. For his research, publications, and disaster prevention work as a volcanologist and engineer,Voight has been honored with numerous awards, appointments, and medals. He is the uncle of actor Jon Voight and songwriter Chip Taylor, actress Angelina Jolie is his niece, and musician James Haven is his nephew. His father was professional golf player Elmer \”Elmo\” Voight, a leader in the effort to break the color barrier in golf, and his mother Barbara was a teacher and swim instructor. He and his brothers grew up playing golf and also developed an interest in swimming. He graduated from Archbishop Stepinac High School in 1955. After high school, he pursued a 5-year intensive dual-degree program at the University of Notre Dame, studying landslips along Lake Michigan and receiving undergraduate degrees in geology in 1959 and in civil engineering in 1960. He earned his master’s degree in civil engineer from Notre Dame in 1961. He began teaching in 1961, serving as a teaching assistant at Cornell and Columbia.
In 1964, he joined the faculty atPenn State University as an assistant professor ofGeology, becoming a full professor in 1978. In 1978, he published the first volume of a treatise on avalanches, Rockslides and Avalanches, which became a benchmark in studying avalanches and other forms of mass movement. A month prior to the 1980 eruption of Mount. St. Helens, he was contacted by Rocky Crandell, a United States Geological Survey employee working in the Vancouver office near the mountain. He suggested that Voight would opine on a growing bulge, 270 feet long, which had emerged on the north face of the mountain’s face. He was then hired by the USGS to investigate the debris avalanche that initiated the eruption. After his work at Mount. St. Helens brought him international recognition, he continued researching and guiding monitoring efforts at several active volcanoes throughout his career, including Nevado del Ruiz in Colombia, Mount Merapi in Indonesia, and Soufrière Hills, a volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. He retired from teaching in June 2005 but continuing his research. He initiated an endowment under his name to contribute to the education of volcanic hazard specialists from developing countries. He also served as a guest professor at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands in 1972, working under Jacques Dozy, and served as an visiting professor at University of Toronto in 1973 and at theUniversity of California, Santa Barbara, in 1981.
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This page is based on the article Barry Voight published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 16, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
