15 November 2021–The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) and the Seismological Society of America (SSA) are pleased to announce that David J. Wald, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) in Golden, Colorado, is the 2022 recipient of the William B. Joyner Lecture Award.
Wald will deliver the Joyner Lecture at the EERI 2021 Annual Meeting and 12th National Conference on Earthquake Engineering to be held 27 June-1 July 2022 in Salt Lake City, Utah, and the 2022 SSA Annual Meeting to be held 19-23 April 2022 in Bellevue, Washington.
The lectureship is jointly awarded by EERI and SSA to those who have provided outstanding earth science contributions to the theory and practice of earthquake engineering or outstanding earthquake engineering contributions to the direction and focus of earth science research—together with demonstrated skills of communication at the interface of earthquake science and earthquake engineering.
The lecture honors the distinguished career of William B. Joyner at the U.S. Geological Survey and his abiding commitment to continuing communication and education at the interface between research findings of earthquake science and the practical realities of earthquake engineering.
Wald is involved in research, development, and operations of real-time information systems at the NEIC. He is responsible for developing and managing ShakeMap, which provides near-real-time maps of ground motion and shaking intensity following significant earthquakes; the citizen-science earthquake reporting system Did You Feel it?; and leads development and operations of other systems for post-earthquake response and pre-earthquake mitigation, including ShakeCast, Ground Failure, and PAGER.
Along with his work at USGS, Wald is the Editor-in-Chief of EERI’s premier journal Earthquake Spectra and is an adjunct professor in the geophysics department at the Colorado School of Mines. Wald was an IRIS/SSA Distinguished Lecturer in 2004 and received EERI’s Distinguished Lecturer award in 2014. He also served on the Board of Directors for SSA and EERI and was the 2009 recipient of SSA’s Frank Press Public Service Award. In 2021, Wald received the USGS Shoemaker Lifetime Achievement Award in Communications, an award granted annually to a scientist who creates excitement and enthusiasm for science among non-scientists by using effective communication skills.
Wald met Joyner on various trips to USGS in Menlo Park during his graduate studies and while a National Research Council postdoc at the Pasadena USGS office. Wald considers walking the halls of the USGS in Menlo Park in those days as being like “a kid in a candy store, only the candy in this case was being able to drop in on esteemed scientists like Bill Joyner, Dave Boore, Tom Hanks, Bill Ellsworth, Mary Lou Zoback, and so many others. What an honor!”
Wald’s Joyner lecture will feature a combined seismological/earthquake engineering view of future earthquake response and recovery, where the initial impact and secondary hazard models are rapidly supplemented with crowd-sourced and remotely sensed observations that are integrated in a holistic fashion for more a more accurate view of the consequences.
Visit the William B. Joyner Memorial Lectures page to learn more about the award and past recipients.