He received his B.A. from
University of California, Riverside in 1965, and his Ph.D. from
Yale University in 1969. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1971, and was the chairman of the Department of Geology from 1991 to 1993. He transferred to emeritus status, and moved to Taiwan where he became a Distinguished Chair Research Professor at the
National Taiwan University in 2007. Suppe's research specialties are
structural geology and
tectonics, and he is best known for his work on "fault-related folding" theories with his two classical papers "Geometry and kinematics of fault-bend folding" and "Geometry and kinematics of fault-propagation folding". Additionally, Suppe is also well known for his extensive work on the formation of mountain belts with examples from California, Taiwan, and China. Suppe has been former visiting professor at the
National Taiwan University, the
California Institute of Technology, the
University of Barcelona, and
LMU Munich. Furthermore, he was a
NASA Guest Investigator for the analysis of the Venus images from the Magellan mission. Suppe is also a Christian who has written on the
relationship between science and religion in articles like
Thoughts on the Epistemology of Christianity in Light of Science. == Awards and honors ==