12 January 2026—SSA is pleased to announce the recipients of several of the Society’s awards for 2026. The Harry Fielding Reid Medal, the Charles F. Richter Early Career Award, the Frank Press Public Service Award and the SSA Distinguished Service Award are among the highest honors conferred by the Society.
2026 Harry Fielding Reid Medal: Peter Shearer
Shearer, professor of geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego is the recipient of the 2026 Reid Medal. Shearer is recognized as one of the leading observational seismologists of his generation, noted for his outstanding contributions to improving earthquake locations and other source properties and his research delineating the structure and dynamics of Earth’s mantle and core. He is perhaps best known for his efforts to develop methods of precisely determining earthquake locations, which have led to further insights into fault interactions, seismic stress release, and the physics behind earthquakes. He and his colleagues were some of the first to systematically reprocess whole earthquake catalogs to improve locations. Shearer’s relocated earthquake catalogs and focal mechanisms for southern California have become standards used across hundreds of studies.
2026 Charles F. Richter Early Career Award: Kevin Milner
Milner, a research geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Geologic Hazards Science Center, is the recipient of the 2026 Richter Award. He is recognized for his wide-ranging, globally adopted research that has become central to seismic hazard analysis modeling. Milner’s research contributions—and numerous publications—related to seismic hazard analysis include advanced computational infrastructure open-source tool development, testing earthquake forecasting and early warning systems, quantification of epistemic uncertainty in hazard and risk models, and development of the National Seismic Hazard Model in the U.S. and New Zealand.
2026 Frank Press Public Service Award: Lisa Wald
Wald, retired from the U.S. Geological Survey, is the recipient of the 2026 Press Award. Wald was recognized for her groundbreaking role at the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program in making a wealth of earthquake information available, both educational resources and real-time products, in a variety of forms and through a variety of channels—including internet, text, and email—serving everyone from the general public to seismologists to governments to the media. Wald taught herself HTML in the 1990s to build earthquake.usgs.gov, ushering in the internet era for the Survey.
2026 Distinguished Service to SSA Award: Ruth Harris
Harris, a senior research geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey, is the recipient of the 2026 Distinguished Service Award. Harris joined SSA in 1987, and was first elected as an SSA Board Member from 1997 to 2003. She served as SSA Vice President from 2005-2007, and twice as SSA President, from 2015-2016 and from 2023-2024. She is recognized for efforts in creating the SSA Annual Meeting’s Student Presentation Awards Program, her support for the development of open access options for the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA), Seismological Research Letters (SRL), and her current service as associate editor for The Seismic Record (TSR), along with her active participation on numerous SSA committees.
Nominations for SSA 2027 honors are due by 30 September. Learn more about the Society’s annual awards program here.