Profile

António Augusto Ramos Ribeiro was born on 19 July 1939 in Lisbon. He was a geologist of the Portuguese Geological Survey from 1961 to 1968. He undertook postgraduate studies at the Sorbonne University in Paris (1962-1964) and at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom (1974-1975), supervised by Professors Robert Shackleton and John Ramsay, in the speciality of Structural Geology and Tectonics. He did an internship in San Francisco, California, in 1976, in the field of Seismotectonics. He obtained his PhD from the University of Montpellier in 1976 under the supervision of Professor Maurice Mattauer. 

He has been a Full Professor at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon since 1979 and Professor Emeritus at the University of Lisbon since 2015. He founded the Laboratory of Tectonophysics and Experimental Tectonics in 1992 and promoted its integration into the Dom Luiz Institute. He has carried out fieldwork in more than 15 countries and participated in various international projects (IGCP, NATO and the EU).

He was a member of the Board of Directors of the European Geosciences Union (1983-1989 and 2004-2010). He has been a member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences since 1989 and of the Academia Europaea since 1991. He was awarded the Boa Esperança Prize for Science and Technology in 1995. He was awarded the title of Cavaleiro da Ordem de Santiago e Espada by President Jorge Sampaio in 2005. 

He is the author or co-author of 7 books and around 350 articles. In the theoretical field, he stands out for his formulation of the Soft Plate Tectonics theory, the development of original methods for quantifying the deformation of the Earth’s crust and studies of seismic hazard, such as the origin of the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.