Advancing earthquake science worldwide
This category is for the At Work column
12 March 2024–Earthquakes were part of Luis Donoso Carmona’s environment “for as long as I can remember,” growing up in northern Chile in the small city of Vallenar in the Atacama Desert, he said. His great-grandmother told stories of the destroyed ports and railway lines and overturned locomotives she had … Continue Reading »
13 February 2024–Oceans cover about 70% of the Earth’s surface—a fact that draws HyeJeong Kim’s scientific gaze under the sea, even as the seismologist now works on dry land as a postdoc at the University of Utah. “If you don’t have seismic stations under that massive water, it’s limiting our … Continue Reading »
8 January 2024–The characterization of uncertainty has been a theme of Adrian Rodriguez-Marek’s career as an earthquake engineer. “That was something that I was interested in from the very first time that I got into hazard analysis,” he explained. “When it comes to ground motion prediction, as a layperson you … Continue Reading »
23 October 2023–Gabrielle Tepp grew up in Michigan—far from the earthquakes and volcanoes she would later study. She also “grew up in a small city where ‘scientist’ wasn’t really a career path,” she recalls, but she was good at math and curious about how things worked. She thought she might … Continue Reading »
20 September 2023–Throughout her career, Natalie Balfour has moved back and forth between research, management and leadership roles. “It is a bit of who I am,” said Balfour, now the head of research at Toka Tū Ake EQC, Aotearoa New Zealand’s Earthquake Commission. “I love learning about natural hazards, about … Continue Reading »
18 August 2023–It sounds like science fiction, but one of Carene Larmat’s tasks as a geoscientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory is time reversal. “During my Ph.D. it became possible to perform time reversal of the seismic waves created by an earthquake, using a supercomputer and the full waveform solver … Continue Reading »