Lisa M. Stewart was my Ph.D. student at Yale from 1978 to 1983. Her thesis, "Strain release along mid-ocean ridge transform faults", dealt with the question of slow earthquakes along transform segments of the Mid-Oceanic Ridge system. After a year of post-doc with Don Forsyth at Brown University, she joined Schlumberger-Doll Research.
Bong-Gon Jo started his Ph.D. at Yale, and followed me to Northwestern
when I moved in 1984. His thesis, entitled "Dispersion and attenuation
of Rayleigh wave overtones" was defended at Yale in 1986. He subsequently
joined the Faculty of
Chonbuk [Jeonbug] National
University in his native
Korea, where he rose to the rank of Full Professor.
Dr. Jo passed away in 2015.
Paul R. Lundgren worked on body-wave modeling in subduction zones. He defended his thesis entitled "Rupture characteristics of complex earthquakes" in the Summer of 1988. Paul then spent one year as a NATO post-doctoral fellow at the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica in Rome, working with Domenico Giardini, and then joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where he works in the Earth Dynamics Program.
Michael E. Wysession spent the years 1986-1991 at Northwestern. Besides his dissertation, entitled "Diffracted seismic waves and the dynamics of the core-mantle boundary", Michael also worked on the compilation of intraplate seismicity in the Pacific Basin. After graduation, Michael joined Washington University in Saint Louis, where he is now a Full Professor.
Mark T. Woods was in charge of the Midway Island seismological project. The idea was to test Detrick and Crough's model of "rejuvenation" of the oceanic lithosphere by a hotspot, by inverting dispersion properties of surface waves along a fossil hotspot track. After defending his thesis entitled "Seismic surface wave investigations of three hotspot tracks" in 1993, Mark joined the Air Force Technical Applications Center in Florida, where he rose to the position of Chief, Geophysics Division, Directorate of Nuclear Treaty Monitoring.
Wei-chuang Huang defended his Ph.D. thesis, entitled "Centroid moment tensor solutions from analog seismograms of deep earthquakes (1907-1976)" in 1996. This project consisted of extending the Harvard Centroid-Moment-Tensor catalogue backwards in time for deep earthquakes. After a post-doctoral appointment under Jim Ni at New Mexico State University, Wei-chuang now works for the U.S. Navy in China Lake, California.
Wm. Philip Richardson was in charge of the Micronesian PASSCAL experiment and was at Northwestern from 1992 to 1998. His thesis entitled "Surface wave tomography of the Ontong-Java Plateau: Seismic probing of the largest igneous province" revealed the crustal and upper mantle structure of this "LIP", and suggested that it may have a deep root or keel in the mantle. Upon graduation, Philip joined Chevron Petroleum in New Orleans, where he rose to Intellectual Property Manager for Earth Science and Technical Computing in Houston.
Po-fei Chen defended his thesis, entitled "Distribution, origin and implications of seismic stress release in shallow and intermediate-depth subduction systems" in 2002. This project, carried out in close association with Craig Bina, mixed seismology (applying the Centroid-Moment Tensor inversion technique to intermediate-depth historical earthquakes) and mineral physics (understanding the correlation or absence thereof between slab earthquakes and volcanism) in the context of subduction environments. After post-doctoral fellowships at the Institute of Earth Sciences of the Academia Sinica, and the Central Weather Bureau in Taipei, Po-fei joined the Faculty at his alma mater, National Central University in Jongli, where he is now a Full Professor.
Carl W. Ebeling defended his thesis, entitled "Discriminants and detectors: Seismological studies of Tsunami Earthquakes and Hurricane Microseisms" in 2012. He is now a Senior Development Engineer with Project IDA at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.
Amir Salaree defended his thesis, entitled "Theoretical and computational contributions to the modeling of global tsunamis", in 2019. He is now a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan.
Nooshin Saloor defended her thesis, entitled Contributions to modern quantifications of seismic sources", in 2020. She is now a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Michigan State University.
Andrew Newman worked on the development of the Energy-to-Moment parameter Θ used to characterize source slowness, particularly for the so-called "tsunami earthquakes". He is presently a Full Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
Alberto López worked on a reassessment of the seismological characteristics of the 1946 Aleutian earthquake, which generated a monstruous tsunami throughout the Pacific Basin. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Mayagüez.
John E. Vidale was my undergraduate advisee at Yale. After completing a Ph.D. with Don Helmberger at Caltech, John worked for several years at the Menlo Park Office of the US Geological Survey, and later at UCLA and the University of Washington. In 2017, he joined the University of Southern California as Director of the Southern California Earthquake Center.
Karen M. Fischer also was my undergraduate advisee at Yale. She went on to MIT for her Ph.D., working with Tom Jordan and Marcia McNutt. After a post-doc at Lamont, she is now a Full Professor at Brown University.
Beth A. Rees was a double major (Integrated Science Program and Geological Sciences) at Northwestern. In her senior year, she worked on the relocation of some very deep earthquakes, a study ultimately published as Rees and Okal [1987]. She obtained an M.S. from the University of Rhode Island and now works for Exxon Production and Research.
Keith Koper was another Integrated Science Program and Geological Sciences double major, who worked with me in 1992-93 on disproofing the proposed presence of a periodicity in the aftershocks of the Landers earthquake at the exact eigenfrequency of one of the torsional modes of the Earth. After a Ph.D. at Washington University and a post-doc at the University of Arizona, Keith joined St. Louis University, and later the University of Utah, where he is now a Full Professor. He is an expert in forensic seismology, having studied such events as the sinking of the Kursk in 2000, the bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi in 1998, and the 2000 gas pipeline explosion in Carlsbad, New Mexico.
Amy R. Langenhorst
was yet another undergraduate in the
Integrated
Science Program.
She worked on the properties of strain release on major
transform faults of the Southern Pacific Ocean, in relation to the
exploration of the Hollister Ridge [Okal and Langenhorst, 2000].
After graduation, she joined NOAA as a Computer Scientist.
Amy passed away in 2016.
