William Lowrie was born in Hawick, Scotland, and attended the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated in 1960 with first class honors in physics. He achieved a masters degree in geophysics at the University of Toronto and in 1967 a doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh. After two years in the research laboratory of Gulf Oil Company he became a researcher at the Lamont–Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University, New York. In 1974 he was elected Professor of Geophysics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland, where he taught and researched until retirement in 2004. His research in rock magnetism and paleomagnetism consisted of deducing the Earth's magnetic field in the geological past from the magnetizations of dated rocks. The results were applied to the solution of geologic-tectonic problems and to analysis of the polarity history of the geomagnetic field. Professor Lowrie has authored 135 scientific articles, and a second edition of his acclaimed 1997 textbook Fundamentals of Geophysics was published in 2007. He has been President of the European Union of Geosciences (1987–9) and Section President and Council member of the American Geophysical Union (2000–2). He is a Fellow of AGU and a Member of the Academia Europaea.