Brenton Hirao is a senior undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, member of the UCSC Seismology Group, and 2020 SCEC SOURCES Intern. Brenton has participated in a variety of research projects that include setting up a permanent network of campaign GPS monuments around the Cal Poly Pomona campus, measurement of paleomagnetic sample stability, and granular flow of densely suspended granular packs using refractive index matching and particle image velocimetry. He is now working on the creeping section of the central San Andreas Fault using data captured by the USGS creepmeters and Plate Boundary Observatory borehole strainmeters using MATLAB, Baytap-08, and Obspy. He is particularly interested in relating experimentally derived processes to larger scale observations.
Brenton will graduate in the spring of 2021 and hopes to continue his work in geophysics in graduate school, earn a Ph.D and work for the USGS, UNAVCO, or some comparable agency.
