John Verhoogen was a Belgian-American geologist and geophysicist. Verhoogen became ill at age 17 from poliomyelitis, which caused him problems throughout the rest of his life. Nevertheless, he studied mining at the University of Brussels and engineering geology at the University of Liège. He then went to the USA, where he studied at the University of California, Berkeley under Howel Williams. In 1936 he received his doctorate in geology from Stanford University, although most of the doctoral work was supervised by Williams at Berkeley. Verhoogen was then at the University of Brussels from 1936 to 1939. During the late 1930s and World War II, he was in the Belgian Congo, where he studied the volcano Nyamuragira and worked on the procurement of strategic mineral resources. From 1947 he was at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a professor and remained until his retirement in 1976. He was an early advocate of plate tectonics. In the 1950s, Verhoogen at Berkeley was responsible for the expansion of research in geochronology with isotopes and paleomagnetism. He was the coauthor of an influential textbook on petrology. He is known for the development of a theory of thermodynamics of the formation of rocks and application of thermodynamics on processes in the Earth's mantle and crust, establishing convection as the dominant mode of heat transfer. Verhoogen was elected in 1956 a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Astronomical Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the Geological Society of America. In 1978 he received the Arthur L. Day Prize and Lectureship and in 1958 he received the Arthur L. Day Medal. He was twice a Guggenheim Fellow and received the André Dumont Medal of the Belgian Geological Society. From 1951 to 1954 he was Vice President of the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior. He was married to Ilse Goldschmidt, a native of Austria. He was predeceased by his wife and was survived by two sons, two daughters, and seven grandchildren. His doctoral students include Allan V. Cox and Richard Doell.
