Biography
I was born in Paris in 1950, the son of a French mother and a Slovak father, who were soon separated geographically by the Iron Curtain. I graduated through the rigorous scientific curriculum of the French lycées and entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure where I majored in Physics. In 1969, I held a summer job with the University of Alberta as a field assistant for a geomagnetic project spanning the Great Plains and Rockies, discovering that it was possible to mix the fun of science with that of the outdoors. This soon motivated my switch to geophysics, this time seismology, and in the summer of 1974, I entered the Ph.D. program at Caltech for what I described to my family as a 3- to 4-year stint abroad. Forty-seven years later, I am still here… Things were easy back then, post-docs were not a mandatory stage in academic life, and before I knew it, I was an Assistant Professor at Yale. In 1984, I moved to Northwestern, into a dynamic Department full of (then) young enthusiastic geophysicists.
My interest in Earth structure and seismic sources led me to a number of worldwide projects, involving the deployment of temporary seismic stations in remote environments including far-flung Pacific islands and even icebergs drifting along the Antarctic coast, as well as lecturing in countless countries ranging from Indonesia to Vietnam and Iran.
A 35-yr collaboration with French scientists in Tahiti sharpened my interest in tsunamis, for which I helped develop various real-time warning strategies, as well as methods for the modern quantification of historical events through interviews of surviving elderly witnesses (see picture). My research in this field led to the development of “Geological Hazards”, a popular distro which used to attract scores of non-majors.
After my retirement in 2016, I shepherded my last two graduate students to the completion of their Ph.D., and continue to this day various research projects. I am also a member of an informal group fostering the world-wide preservation and archiving of pre-digital seismograms, including here at Northwestern, where I am the curator of a microfilm collection holding more than 5 million units.
Photo Note:
Chahbahar, Iran, October 2010. Interview of an elderly witness of the 1945 Indian Ocean tsunami. I am second from the left.