Advancing earthquake science worldwide
This category is for the At Work column
4 December 2025—Thanh-Son Phạm calls himself a “method developer.” As a seismologist, this means that his interests are to develop ways to reach from the Earth’s inner core to the ice sheets of Antarctica. Phạm, a research fellow at the Australian National University, discovered the geosciences after studying mathematics and … Continue Reading »
4 November 2025—Bill Curry grew up in Alberta, Canada, in what he calls “the home of the Canadian energy industry,” so the idea of exploring a career in the earth sciences came early to him. “My favorite subjects were math and physics, which drew me to geophysics,” Curry explained. “In … Continue Reading »
16 September 2025—For her dissertation, Louisa Barama worked on ways to characterize seismic events like tsunamigenic and deep earthquakes in near real time, using teleseismic data, calculations of radiated earthquake energy and machine learning techniques. “Then I got this opportunity to work on an Air Force Research Lab project [led … Continue Reading »
18 August 2025—There’s a lot of things that Rob Anthony likes about New Mexico. But as a geophysicist interested in noise, there’s one aspect that stands out: the relative seismic quietness. “We’re one of the quietest spots in the United States,” Anthony says of his workplace at the Albuquerque Seismological … Continue Reading »
16 June 2025—If plate tectonics are canon in the Earth sciences, the details of what makes up a “plate” are surprisingly tricky, says Hannah Mark. “The definition of a plate is a section of the outermost solid layer of the Earth that behaves as a rigid body, and deforms only … Continue Reading »
12 May 2025—In Guilherme de Melo’s small hometown in northeastern Brazil, he remembers constant droughts that plagued the town’s twin livelihoods of agriculture and livestock and led to shortages of potable water. To remedy this, a large dam was built in the early 2000s on the river that flows through … Continue Reading »