Nadia Lapusta, selected as an AGU Fellow, 2020
Congratulations to Nadia Lapusta for being selected as an AGU Fellow. Nadia, a member of the Seismo Lab, is the Lawrence A. Hanson, Jr. Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Geophysics at Caltech.
Nadia is an internationally recognized expert on the physics of earthquakes. With her many students and post-docs, Nadia has made ground-breaking progress in understanding earthquake sequences through the study of crustal faults, like the San Andreas Fault, by developing and applying multi-time-scale models that include fault nucleation, dynamic rupture along the fault, energy dissipation, and seismic wave propagation. These extraordinarily detailed and computationally challenging models have uncovered how rupture is governed by friction and other fault properties, while optimizing the physics against geophysical observations, like regional geodetic and seismic observations.
For a nice description of Nadia's work in computational studies of earthquake processes, see the breakthrough article here.