College of Fellows Distinguished Lecture Series Speaker

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Barbara Romanowicz
University of California, Berkeley
United States of America
Primary Affiliation: Study of Earth's Interior

Abstract title: Imaging the Earth's Deep Interior using seismic waves

Overview
In this lecture, I will illustrate how state-of-the-art imaging techniques allow us to: track the fate of tectonic plates that dive back into the mantle beneath the Pacific "ring of fire", improve our understanding of the morphology and role of the LLSVPs, follow the paths of deeply rooted hot mantle plumes, as they ascend towards the surface and are expressed there in the form of hotspot volcanism, and start to unravel finer scale structure at their roots.

Biography
Barbara Romanowicz holds a PhD degree in Geophysics from the University of Paris 7, France. Between 1982 and 1990, as a researcher at the CNRS, she developed GEOSCOPE, a then state-of-the-art global network of digital seismic stations for the study of earthquakes and the structure of the earth's interior. In 1991, she was appointed Director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory and professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California, Berkeley. During her directorship (until 2011), she helped establish a joint UC Berkeley/US Geological Survey real-time earthquake notification system for northern California. Her research interests include the study of deep earth structure and dynamics using seismic data analysis and modeling, and in particular developing new methodologies and implementing numerical seismic wavefield computations in seismic imaging at the continental and global scales. She also has an interest in earthquake processes and scaling laws, the development of modern broadband seismic and geophysical observatories on land and in the oceans, earth's normal modes and low frequency "hum". She was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2005 and to the French Academy of Sciences in 2013, and was appointed to the chair of Physics of the Earth Interior at Collège de France in Paris in 2011, a position she held until 2020. Among other honors received, she is the 2019 recipient of the AGU William Bowie medal, and 2021 recipient of the IASPEI medal. She is currently a professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley and has served on the Scientific Council of the European Research Council since 2015.