Trond H. Torsvik was VISTA Professor from 2000 to 2004

VISTA-professor Trond H. Torsvik Foto: Eirik Furu Baardsen

Within geophysics, he specialises in palaeomagnetism, large-scale plate tectonics and deep-mantle dynamics. Torsvik was affiliated with VISTA Exploration with the project "Kinematic strain-stress-time", which also employed a postdoctoral fellow.

Trond H. Torsvik has published more than 175 articles in international journals and numerous reports for the Geological Survey of Norway and the oil industry.

Trond H. Torsvik is internationally recognised as an outstanding, innovative researcher who has set up a number of research teams. He has worked with several Norwegian and overseas universities and collaborates with the oil industry. Within the framework of a five-year project funded by the oil industry, including Statoil, he built up a laboratory for geological age determinations. The laboratory is at the Geological Survey of Norway and is unique in Scandinavia. 

Trond H. Torsvik was elected as a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 1996, and is the only living Norwegian to have been made a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).  He has also been elected to the Academia Europea and the Danish Academy of Science and Letters (Fellow), is Honorary Professor at the University of Johannesburg (South Africa), and was team leader at the Centre for Advanced Study (2010--11). He is the only Norwegian working in geology / solid earth physics to have been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant (NOK 20 million in 2011).

In 2009 Trond H. Torsvik was appointed professor in the Physics of Geological Processes (PGP) programme at the University of Oslo. This professorship is funded by Statoil (under the Academia Agreement 2009-2014). He is also team leader of Solid Earth Physics at PGP.