Advancing earthquake science worldwide
This category is for the At Work column
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 »
19 July 2023–Like all scientific disciplines, seismology is not immune to trends. And right now, creeping faults are having a bit of a moment, according to Ruth Harris. The topic is a long-time research interest of Harris, a Senior Scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earthquake Science Center and president … Continue Reading »
19 June 2023–Interested in math and science early on, and looking for a job that would benefit society, Greg McLaskey went to college to study civil engineering. “The thing that excited me the most about civil engineering was non-destructive testing,” he recalled, so he was soon learning all about wave … Continue Reading »
22 May 2023–Simona Gabrielli studies seismic attenuation, or what happens when a seismic wave interacts with its surrounding medium. She compares it to how a stone dropped into a pond sends ripples through the water, and the ripples change direction depending on what they meet as they move across the … Continue Reading »