Exciting news! We're transitioning to the Statewide California Earthquake Center. Our new website is under construction, but we'll continue using this website for SCEC business in the meantime. We're also archiving the Southern Center site to preserve its rich history. A new and improved platform is coming soon!
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Yehuda Ben-Zion

Statewide California Earthquake Center
University of Southern California
SCEC Director and Professor of Earth Sciences

Expertise: physics of earthquakes and faults, seismic imaging, source properties, analysis of seismic catalogs
 
 
About Me Publications
Yehuda Ben-Zion is the Director of the Statewide California Earthquake Center and Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California. He received a B.Sc. in physics and geology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1982 and Ph.D. in geophysics from the University of Southern California in 1990. Ben-Zion was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and has held visiting Professor positions at institutions in the U.S., Japan, Germany, France, Norway, Australia, and China. He has supervised over 35 graduate students and 10 postdoctoral scholars.

His research is focused on physics of earthquakes and faults using a variety of theoretical tools and observations. Current interests include include localization of deformation, high resolution imaging of fault zones and the crust, earthquake source properties, near-fault data, crustal stress and strain fields, composition of continuous seismic waveforms, temporal changes of seismic properties, dynamic ruptures in geologically relevant structures, brittle damage rheology, spatio-temporal seismicity patterns, earthquake forecasting, analysis of seismic hazard.

Ben-Zion is an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and was awarded the Humboldt Research Prize in Geophysics, the Beno Gutenberg Medal of the European Geosciences Union, and the Mercator Fellowship from the German Research Society. He has given over 30 invited talks and keynote lectures in the last three years; and published over 320 scientific papers and edited eight books. Ben-Zion was an editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research (2015-2022), was on the editorial board of other journals, and has served as President of the IUGG Mathematical Geophysics Committee (2011-2020).

SCEC Participation

Current Roles

SCEC Director (2019 - Present)
SCEC Executive Committee, Chair (2019 - Present)
SCEC Executive Committee, Member (2019 - Present)

Past Roles

SCEC Board of Directors, Chair (2019)
SCEC Science Planning Committee, Group Leader (2016 - 2018)