22 April 2024–Recipients of the first SSA Community Grants of 2024 will support students attending a training workshop on volcano and rift seismicity in East Africa and help organize a popular annual seismology workshop for students.
Suzan van der Lee of Northwestern University and Emily Brodsky of the University of California, Santa Cruz were awarded $5,000 to support postdoctoral students attending a week-long workshop for training in select seismological analysis and for cogeneration of ideas for extended routine operations and/or research towards additional characterization and understanding of regional tectonics and seismic hazard around northern branches of the East African Rift System. Early and mid-career seismologists from East African countries have been invited to attend.
Kiara Daly of Cornell University and Maochuan Zhang and Yiyu Ni of the University of Washington were awarded $5,000 to organize the 11th in-person iteration of the Seismology Student Workshop (SSW), recognized as the only student-focused and student-led seismology and tectonophysics workshop in the country. Taking place this year in Seattle, the SSW provides a forum where students can discuss their science, share their graduate school and career development experiences, and create meaningful connections with fellow seismology graduate students, all in a low-stress environment. (Students can register here for this year’s workshop by 2 May 2024.)
“For the past 11 years SSA has made the Seismology Student Workshop possible through their continued financial support and without SSA this workshop would not be possible,” said Daly. “We try to make SSW as accessible as possible and encourage participation of attendees from diverse backgrounds. Recognizing that financial constraints can act as a barrier, we cover the costs of accommodation and food expenses for all participants, reducing the economic burden on attendees. The funding from the SSA community grant and the additional financial support from the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN) is a big help to cover these costs.”
Previous recipients used the community grant to fund a workshop on subduction zone science, Bayesian inversion methods and Arizona’s Earth and planetary geophysics communities.
A July 2023 grant given to Claire Richardson of Arizona State University, Joseph Phillips of Northern Arizona University and Ken Gourley of the University of Arizona led to the first annual conference for the Arizona Collaborative Consortium for Earth and Space Science (ACCESS). The meeting has already generated new research collaborations between ACCESS seismologists, an effort to develop a week-long field geophysics workshop and a student retreat, the three meeting co-chairs said.
“This grant gave us the opportunity to organize a professional meeting and build a seismology and geophysics community that hadn’t existed before,” the ACCESS meeting co-chairs explained. “Without the support of the Grant, this meeting either wouldn’t have been possible or its quality would have been greatly diminished.”
The SSA Community Grants Program accepts applications to support small scientific conferences, workshops and events that provide our members and future seismologists with opportunities for training, learning and networking. Launched in 2022, the program accepts applications twice a year 2022 and is supported by generous donations to SSA’s General Fund.
The next proposal period begins in July, for events occurring September 2024 to August 2025. For more information, contact info@seismosoc.org.