From the ocean floor off Puerto Rico to a billion-year-old fossil failed rift under Illinois-Indiana and pressure buildup beneath Delaware Basin, I use earthquakes and noise to read what the crust is trying to tell us.
My research integrates observational seismology, computational geophysics, and machine learning across three interconnected themes. The tools drive the science: improved velocity models and relocation schemes lead to more accurate earthquake locations; machine learning enables the detection of many more small earthquakes, and these enhanced, more complete catalogs, combined with source-mechanism analyses, reveal fault geometry and stress localization. Integrating source characterization with InSAR-derived surface deformation reveals how strain is partitioned between seismic and aseismic slip among interconnected fault networks.
Current active fieldwork includes a dense nodal deployment in southeast New Mexico (Summer 2026) targeting the crustal velocity structure beneath the most seismically active region in the state, and ongoing ensemble catalog development for the New Mexico using the Pick Aggregator.
Most ML pretrained models struggle when applied to data distribution that is significantly different from what they are trained on. The Pick Aggregator runs different picker-model combinations in parallel and accepts a pick only when at least two independent combinations agree, producing catalogs that generalize across instrumentation and data types and reduce false positives. Application to Puerto Rico reveals a previously unresolved slab tear northeast of the island.
Cross-correlating ambient seismic noise between station pairs reconstructs surface wave Green's functions, which encode the velocity structure of the crust along each path. Joint inversion with teleseismic receiver functions resolves both layer velocities and interface contrasts. Applied to the Wabash Valley, this approach revealed a billion-year-old rift pillow concentrating present-day intraplate seismicity. The same methodology now drives a 200-sensor nodal deployment in southeast New Mexico.
Over 5,400 relocated earthquakes in southern Delaware Basin and satellite InSAR deformation spanning 2009–2022 tell a story of saltwater disposal driving pore pressure southeast along permeable faults, reactivating shallow normal faults at 1.5 km depth, and producing concurrent seismic and aseismic slip that the ground surface records as centimeter-scale linear subsidence.
Over 10,000 weak motion records from the Mw 8.8 Maule and Mw 8.2 Iquique aftershock sequences reveal that seismic energy decays faster through the warm, fluid-saturated crust of central Chile than through the cold, dry crust of the north. Stochastic source–attenuation models constrain frequency-dependent Q(f) across three sub-regions, providing physical validation of non-ergodic ground motion models and a path toward better seismic hazard assessment along the Chilean trench.