Guy Simpson obtained his PhD from the ETH in Zurich (in 1998) and after performing postdoctoral research at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) and the ETH in Zurich he joined the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Geneva (Switzerland) in 2007 as a senior lecturer. 

 His main research interests include faulting and earthquakes in the crust, fluid and heat flow in porous media and landscape evolution that he mainly investigates using numerical models. Simpson has written research articles on a wide range of scientific problems and he has also published a textbook on use of the Finite Element Method in Earth science.