Charles Langston

Harry Fielding Reid Medal | 2025 Recipient

headshot of Charles LangstonCharles Langston, professor emeritus at the Center for Earthquake Research and Information at the University of Memphis, is the 2025 recipient of the Harry Fielding Reid Medal.

Langston is best known for his seminal research on receiver function methodology, developing methods of extracting and analyzing subtle signals from body waves that can be used to image the Earth’s crust and upper mantle in unprecedented detail. The powerful tool, described in his series of key papers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has become a pillar of observational seismology for researchers across the globe.

His receiver function methodology underlies the multi-station imaging techniques used in large seismic deployments by EarthScope Consortium and other international organizations, and Langston’s techniques are also increasingly used to study seismic data collected by single-station deployments from planetary missions such as Mars InSight.

His extensive and innovative work on receiver functions, body-waveform modeling to study shallow earthquakes and explosions, seismic gradiometry and ambient noise, presented in more than 165 research publications, has been influential across the discipline.

“Chuck has advanced our ability to use seismic waveforms to extract valuable information required to advance our understanding of earth and earthquake processes,” said Mitchell Withers, research professor at the University of Memphis who nominated Langston for the award. “His work on imaging the crust and upper mantle, exploring interplate and intraplate seismicity, large and small earthquake rupture and sequences and underground nuclear explosions continues to inform, stimulate and guide current seismological research.”

Langston’s colleagues singled out his intellectual curiosity and his willingness to lead by example in expanding the frontiers of observational seismology, noting his ability to develop new techniques and to then select the data that demonstrate a technique’s possibilities while contributing exciting new findings on topics from the crustal-mantle boundary to the interplay between the Earth’s crust and atmosphere.

His career includes a long history of service to SSA. Langston served as president of SSA in 1990, associate editor (1985-1988) and editor (1992-1995) of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, associate editor of Earthquake Notes (now Seismological Research Letters) from 1979 to 1990, and in various roles, including chair, of the Executive Committee of the Eastern Section-SSA from 2002 to 2009.

Among his numerous honors, Langston became a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2003 and was the Dunavant Professor at the College of Arts and Science at the University of Memphis from 2008 to 2011. He received the Eastern Section’s Jesuit Seismological Association Award in 2011.

Langston received his B.S. in geology from Case Western Reserve University in 1972, and his M.S. (1974) and Ph.D. (1976) in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology.