He remains an emeritus professor there and still conducts research, focusing on rock mechanics, plate tectonics, disaster prevention, and geotechnical engineering.

[2] His brothers are actor Jon Voight and songwriter Chip Taylor,[2] actress Angelina Jolie is his niece, and musician James Haven is his nephew.

[6] After high school, Voight pursued a 5-year intensive dual-degree program at the University of Notre Dame, studying landslips along Lake Michigan[7] and receiving undergraduate degrees in geology in 1959 and in civil engineering in 1960.

[9] Still an emeritus professor at Penn State,[14] he initiated an endowment under his name to contribute to the education of volcanic hazard specialists from developing countries.

[7][15] A month prior to the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens,[15] Voight was contacted by Rocky Crandell,[16] a United States Geological Survey (USGS) employee working in the Vancouver office near the mountain.

[28] In January 1986, Voight visited Nevado del Ruiz responding to concerns from the Colombian government that the northeastern section of the volcano might cave in, causing another eruption.

[30] In July 1989, he obtained a $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Natural and Manmade Hazard Mitigation for his proposal to predict eruptions at Merapi.

Returning to Merapi the following year, Voight compared data from the dead and survivors, including the extent of their burn areas, clothing worn, and lung damage.

While Galeras proved far easier to climb than Nevado del Ruiz, land mines planted to hinder guerrilla forces dotted the slopes of the mountain.

He surmised that phreatic eruptions do not exhibit an acceleration in deformation before taking place and left after confirming that the volcano's monitoring system functioned properly.

[15] In the early 1990s, Voight performed volcanic hazard assessments at Cotopaxi in Ecuador and at Nevado del Huila in Colombia, where his research was impeded by guerrilla factions and drug cartel operations.

Worried about an expanding lava dome at the Soufrière Hills volcano, the island's government asked Voight to assess its potential for an avalanche that could generate an eruption.

[14] Following these eruptions, Voight served as a member of the Risk Assessment Panel that advised Montserrat's government, and he co-established the Caribbean Andesite Lava Island Precision Seismo-geodetic Observatory (CALIPSO) with a team of international scientists.

[32] He continued research at the island with Steven Sparks, a geoscientist at the University of Bristol, establishing the SEA-CALIPSO system to analyze Soufrière Hills by using seismic waves and explosions in the ocean.

[11] Voight's research interests in lava dome collapses, stratovolcanoes, monitoring of active volcanoes, and pyroclastic flows have brought him to Iceland, Indonesia, the West Indies, Italy, and Chile.

[33] Combining his knowledge of engineering and geological concepts, Voight developed the widely used anelastic strain recovery (ASR) method for measuring stress on deep rock.

[11] With a team of geologists, he also derived the material failure forecast method (FFM), which predicts eruption times for volcanoes based on changes in the mountain's surrounding seismic and deformation data.

1989 saw another major year of honors for Voight, as he was named a MacQuarie Research Scholar and again garnered an award from the United States National Committee on Rock Mechanics for his original findings.

"[38] Recalling a conference where Voight appeared, Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at University College London, described him as "an illustrious expert on volcano instability and landslides".

[11] When Voight published his failure forecast prediction mechanism, USGS geologist Robert I. Tilling praised it as "a significant refinement in the interpretation of monitoring data".