Alumni Profile: Professor Richard Reyment
 |
Degree: PhD Science
1967 Since growing up in northern Melbourne during the Great Depression, Richard Reyment has had the most remarkable of careers. Now a world leading researcher across different areas of geology, palaeontology and mathematics, his thirst for knowledge has led him around the globe. |
Richard was born in Coburg in 1926 and after completing his secondary schooling at Scotch College, gained the first of his many degrees from the University of Melbourne by graduating with a Bachelor of Science in 1948. His first significant appointment was as a geologist with the British Colonial Service who immediately stationed the 24-year-old in Nigeria. Richard was able to take time out from his posting to marry his Swedish fiancé, Eva, in Stockholm in September 1950.
Richard utilised his time in Africa to research the palaeontology of Nigeria and surrounding countries which assisted him in completing his Masters of Science at Melbourne in 1956. From here he took up a senior lecturing position at Stockholm University which allowed him to pursue more scholarly work on Western African geology.
Richard found the need to further divide his time between Europe and Africa when he was asked to start up a Department of Geology at the rapidly expanding University of Ibadan, Nigeria, which at that time operated as a college of the University of London. He stayed in Nigeria until 1965 when he returned to take up another professorship in Sweden, this time as Associate Professor of Biometry with the Natural Science Research Council.
He obtained his PhD from Melbourne under the tutelage of Professor Martin Glaessner in 1967 and was then appointed to the Chair of Historical Geology and Palaeontology at the University of Uppsala in central Sweden. While Richard filled this post until his retirement in 1991 he continued an amazing amount of work in support of the fields of geology and palaeontology.
He was General Secretary and subsequently president of the International Association for Mathematical Geology and in 2002 became the only recipient to receive that organisation's official Commendation.
He was President of the Geological Society of Sweden in 1972 and one of the founders of the European Union of Geosciences.
He has more than 360 publications to his name including 11 books which cover the broad spectrum of the geology and palaeontology of Africa, the USA, Japan, South America, Australia, Sweden and Spain.
Richard has held visiting professorships and fellowships at Moscow, Kansas, Syracuse, Paris, Cambridge, Malaga, Bonn, Tel Aviv, Montpellier, Tokyo, Oxford and most recently at the University of Tsukuba in Japan.
His dual nationality (Swedish and British) has proved most useful as he has traversed the globe conducting his research and with four children and three grandchildren to keep him busy as well, there can be no doubt that Richard has lived an extremely productive life, where scientific discovery has been a passport to an astonishing variety of cultural experiences.
