Imagining the Earth's Interior

Barbara Romanowicz studied mathematics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and holds a Ph.D. in geophysics from the University of Paris 7. As a researcher at France's CNRS between 1982 and 1990, she developed GEOSCOPE, a then state-of-the-art global network of digital seismic stations for the study of earthquakes and the earth's interior. In 1991, she was appointed director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory (BSL) and professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Berkeley. During her directorship until 2011, she helped establish a joint real-time earthquake notification system for northern California between the BSL and the U.S. Geological Survey. Her research interests include the study of deep earth structure and dynamics using seismological tools; implementing numerical seismic wavefield computations in seismic tomography; earthquake processes and scaling laws; and the development of modern broadband seismic and geophysical observatories on land and in the oceans. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005 and was recently appointed to chair Physics of the Earth Interior at the Collège de France in Paris.