Claudio Vita-Finzi was Professor of Neotectonics at University College London before moving to the Department of Mineralogy at the Natural History Museum in 2001 as a Scientific Associate. He has worked on Holocene deformation in South America, the Near East and Southeast Asia, and is the author of many articles and books, including Recent Earth movements (1986). He was awarded the G.K. warren Prize of the US Academy of Sciences in 1994 for his work in fluvial geology and was elected to the Qamerican Philosophical Society in 1997.