John Henry Woodhouse FRS is an English geophysicist, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford .
He earned a Ph.D in 1975 in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University.
After 2 years at Scripps and Cambridge, he joined the Harvard faculty in 1978 as an assistant professor.
He discovered wave speed anomalies associated with plate motion and undertook the first global study of shear velocity in the lower mantle.
The medal honoured his lifetime of work understanding the Earth's interior, and in particular, his development of a computational algorithm which is now a standard tool in seismology.