Professor Paul Davis

Recent Developments in Seismology: New Views of Earthquakes and Ground Shaking

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

5:30 p.m. Reception, 6:30 p.m. Lecture

Faculty Center, California Room

Please join us at the start of the lecture to celebrate a generous gift to geology from the estate of J. Douglas Traxler.

Development in condensed matter physics and high performance computing have enabled new views on the nature of earthquake sources and resultant distant ground shaking. New models incorporating the fractal nature of earthquake source regions, earthquake clustering, and catastrophic damage from diffraction of seismic energy will be described, with implications for societal hazards.

Biography

Paul Davis is a graduate of the University of Queensland. After appointments in Edmonton, Canada, and Cambridge, he joined the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he is Professor of Geophysics. He has published extensively on geophysical topics, especially seismology. His professional honors include a Guggenheim fellowship, fellowship of the Royal Astronomical Society and the American Geophysical Union and a visiting Leverhulme professorship to the University of Oxford.