Awards

Guggenheim Fellow - 1961

About Paul E. Potter

Paul Potter joined the faculty at IU Bloomington as an associate professor of geology in the College of Arts and Sciences in January 1963. He was appointed to the Graduate School faculty that same year, promoted from associate professor to professor in 1966, and resigned in 1971 to join the faculty at the University of Cincinnati, where he retired in 1992 as professor emeritus of geology. Potter received a Ph.D. in geology from the University of Chicago in 1952.

Potter is an educator, researcher, and author with many distinguished accomplishments. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Earth Science in 1961. He took a leave of absence from IU in the fall of 1964 to work for the Bureau de Reservoir of Compagnie Francaise des Petroles in Paris, and again, in 1970 to visit geological groups in Algeria. He received the Pettijohn Award for Excellence in Sedimentology from the Society for Sedimentary Geology (SEPM) in 1992, the Mather Medal for contributions to Ohio geology by the Ohio Survey in 1999, the American Association for Petroleum Geologist’s (AAPG) Eastern Section’s Outstanding Educator Award in 2000, the John T. Galey Memorial Award from the Eastern Section of AAPG in 2007, and the AAPG Sidney Powers Memorial Award (the association’s highest honor) in 2016. He wrote Sedimentology of Shale with Maynard and Pryor (Springer-Verlag, 1980), which is one of the first textbooks on the subject, and Sand and Sandstone with Pettijohn and Siever (Springer-Verlag, 1972).