11 June 2025—The SSA Annual Meeting returns to its California roots next year as we celebrate the 120th anniversary of the Society. The 14-18 April 2026 conference in Pasadena offers a chance for the global seismology community to come together for what many past attendees have called the most essential professional meeting on their yearly calendars.

The 2026 Annual Meeting co-chairs, Kuo-Fong Ma of Institute of Earth Sciences, Academia Sinica, and Elizabeth Cochran of the U.S. Geological Survey, say Pasadena is at the epicenter of seismology past, present and future.
Ma received her Ph.D. at Caltech, “and so Pasadena is a lovely town for me, since it was an important time in my career and I made so many friends there,” she said. Including Caltech, the nearby USGS offices, the University of Southern California and more, “Pasadena is a hub for me to reach out to all the exciting science in California.”
Session Submissions Open 15 August
The co-chairs think the 2026 meeting will be an excellent opportunity to showcase new technologies, as well as the increasing number of interdisciplinary research projects in the field.
“You can really see the whole gamut of seismology-specific work at this meeting, but in recent years, it’s been nice to see a broadening of topics to include related fields that aren’t just seismology, bringing in folks from geodesy and geology, for example,” said Cochran.

She hopes to see session submissions to the meeting that combine laboratory, modeling and observations of earthquakes. Recent large earthquakes captured by new data types such as distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) would be exciting to feature in “sessions that highlight new uses for new data or new uses for old data.”
Ma said her colleagues in Asia in particular will be interested in sessions about dense seismic networks, such as those operating in California, Taiwan and Japan, and how researchers in those countries might work together on earthquake observations.
She would also like to see some session submissions on total earthquake hazard and building resilience, bringing in more research from social science. “I think that’s an important topic to explore, from the earthquake hazard itself to engineering to societal impact.”
The region’s extensive earthquake engineering history should draw good attendance from earthquake engineers as well as pure seismologists, Cochran said. “Because it’s such an urban setting, that’s a huge need in Los Angeles and all of California to understand how to design and build our buildings so that they can withstand earthquakes and understand seismic risks to the current buildings.”
Cochran and Ma also noted that the U.S. West Coast’s Shake Alert operations centered at USGS (Pasadena) could bring together an international group of researchers interested in earthquake early warning.
A Supportive Community
Ma attended her first SSA Annual Meeting in 1991 in Santa Cruz as a Ph.D. student. “I was thrilled as a student, I got so much attention from my presentation from the audience. They gave me such a positive and very close discussion, because the size of SSA is just about right. I was very thrilled for all these professors to come to me directly to ask questions and give me comments on my talk.”

Cochran’s first SSA meeting was in Hawaii in 2007. “I think what stood out to me for that meeting, and it’s true through all of the SSA meetings that I’ve been to, is that SSA has always been a great conference to get a combination of the latest theoretical research on seismology all the way through to applications.”
Larger meetings with a less specific research focus and lots of overlapping sessions can end up being more distracting than productive, Ma suggested. “SSA is very focused and it’s also easy to reach out to people that you would like to meet,” she said. “There are many exciting talks, but it’s always so nice to meet up with your old friends and bring up the science too.”
Fun in the SoCal Sun

As usual for the Annual Meeting, the co-chairs are planning technical and career development workshops as well as a few fascinating field trips around town. “Pasadena is just a nice setting for a meeting,” said Cochran. “There’s a lot of nice restaurants and fun sites nearby.”
Southern California’s special place in seismic history will likely feature in a few of these field trips, she added, potentially exploring landmark spots in the history of the discipline or learning more about how faults have contributed to the region’s unique geography and natural hazards. (Workshops and field trips will be announced in late summer 2025.)
Ma hopes that many of her colleagues in Taiwan and Japan with ties to Caltech and other institutions in the region will join the Annual Meeting as a sort of homecoming.
“I always go to them and say, ‘hey, let’s go back to Pasadena. It’s alumni time!’” she said. “Let’s meet the younger generation and the senior ones, and let’s have a hangout together in Pasadena!”