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Governor appoints Greg Beroza to California Seismic Safety Commission

Stanford Geophysics Professor Greg Beroza has been appointed by Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. to the Alfred E. Alquist Seismic Safety Commission for the State of California. The appointment is pending approval of the California State Senate.

June 5, 2013
Greg Beroza

Established in 1975, the 20-member commission investigates earthquakes, researches earthquake–related issues and reports and recommends policies and programs needed to reduce earthquake risk to the governor and the legislature. Its duties range from managing California’s Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program and reviewing seismic activities funded by the state, to proposing and reviewing earthquake-related legislation and recommending earthquake safety programs to governmental agencies and the private sector. 

A fellow of the American Geophysical Union, Beroza is the Wayne Loel Professor of Earth Sciences at Stanford.  He joined the Stanford faculty in 1990 and has been chair of the geophysics department since 2008. He heads the Earthquake Seismology Group, where he develops and applies techniques for analyzing seismograms in order to understand how earthquakes work and to help quantify the hazards they pose.  Working with graduate students and postdoctoral scholars, he developed a new approach to predict earthquake shaking. The method uses seismic waves present in the Earth at all times to construct virtual earthquakes that can predict variations in the strength of shaking during real earthquakes.

For the past six years, Beroza has served as deputy director at the Southern California Earthquake Center, a community of more than 600 scientists, students and others from more than 60 institutions worldwide.  The Center is funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Geological Survey to develop a comprehensive understanding of earthquakes in Southern California and elsewhere, and to communicate useful knowledge for reducing earthquake risk. In addition, Beroza chairs the steering committee at the United States Geological Service Advanced National Seismic System and is president-elect of the American Geophysical Union Seismology Section. He earned a doctorate degree in geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. in geophysics from the University of California at Santa Cruz.