Robert Dean Hatcher Jr. (born October 22, 1940, in Madison, Tennessee)[1] is an American structural geologist, known as one of the world's leading experts on the geology of the southern and central Appalachians.
[5] After about one year as an employee of the Humble Oil and Refining Company (now merged into ExxonMobil), he was appointed an assistant professor at Clemson University.
[2] Hatcher served from 1990 to 1996 on the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Board on Radioactive Waste Management and from 1993 to 1996 on a Nuclear Regulatory Commission Federal Advisory Committee on reactor safety.
[9] Although he has been mostly concerned with the Appalachians, he has several times visited the North American Cordillera in Canada and the US, the Caledonides in the U.K. and Scandinavia, the Alps, Morocco's High Atlas and Meseta, the Tatra Mountains, and the Southern Andes in Argentina.
[2] With Jack E. Oliver, Sidney Kaufman (1908–2008),[10] and other colleagues, he used COCORP seismic-reflection profiling to investigate a seismic transversal in the southern Appalachians.
With Harold Williams he wrote the important paper Suspect terranes and accretionary history of the Appalachian orogen published in 1982 in the journal Geology.
In 2008 Hatcher was part of a group of geoscientists who received funding from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to investigate the paleoseismology of the Eastern Tennessee seismic zone.
[14] He and his colleagues have done research on "crustal-scale faults, large crystalline thrust sheets, lithotectonic terranes, geophysics, stratigraphy, and paleoseismicity.