2015 Nominating Committee

• Laurent Montesi, Chair, University of Maryland
• Bruce Buffet, University of California, Berkeley
• Matt Knepley, Rice University

2015 Slate of Candidates

Member Representatives will be voting for one candidate for each open position. 

Executive Committee

Position 1:

Louis Moresi, Melbourne University. Website 
I have been closely aligned with CIG since the very first planning meeting. Many in CIG will be familiar with the open-source software I have co-developed: I was the original architect of Citcom and of Ellipsis, and I have led the development of Underworld for the past decade.  I am a strong supporter of open source, community software, open access publication and reproducible science which are deeply interwoven concepts. CIG has been one of the world leaders in bringing these ideas to the fore in geodynamics and in ensuring that our community is an agent of innovation in the Earth Sciences. A culture of innovation also requires stability and continuity to allow ideas to flourish; this is one of the most important roles that CIG has played and must continue to play in computational geodynamics.

Frederik Simons, Princeton University. Website   
I am "new" to CIG, but I have been a proponent of 'reproducible research' from before I knew such a thing had a name. I am primarily a programmer in scripting languages, especially Matlab, which I use for mathematical, seismological, geodetic, and geomagnetic purposes. I am not a "big code" person, but a "smallest functional unit" type. I favor developing "algorithms" over arguing about which language to  implement them in, and as such, my choices are pragmatic and not limiting. My codes appear to have found a broad level of usage worldwide, including translations to other languages. I teach aspects of geophysics and statistical data analysis using computing at the first-year undergraduate through first-year graduate level. I am keen to support the community of (student) researchers through CIG.

Position 2:

Magali Billen, University of California Davis. Website 
I have been involved in CIG since its inception: first as a user of mantle convection and long-term tectonics codes supported by CIG, then as a co-organizer of the 2012 CIG workshop on Mantle Convection and Lithospheric Dynamics, and most recently as a member of the Science Steering Committee.  I have also participated in many CIG workshops and learned new modeling tools through the tutorials presented at these workshops. My own research interests are primarily focused on the rheological structure of subduction zones and its affect on subduction dynamics extending from faulting at the outer rise (longer-term tectonics) to evolution of slabs in the upper mantle and the induced-mantle flow in large-scale, 3-D, time-dependent simulations (mantle convection). My interest in serving CIG as a member of the executive committee is to provide support and guidance that leads to: 1) continued growth and strengthening of ties between the solid earth geodynamics community and experts in computational and mathematical fields, in order to provide the best possible computational tools to our community; and 2) education of the next generation of geodynamicists to take full advantage of these resources to address fundamental questions in geodynamics.  

Claire Currie, University of Alberta. Website 
I have been a member of the Long-Term Tectonics working group for several years and a member of the Executive Committee for the last 2 years. I was also part of the writing committee for the CIG-III NSF proposal (2015) and on the organizing committee for 3 CIG workshops (2012-2014). I am interested in continuing to be part of the CIG Executive Committee because I believe that we are at an exciting time in computational geoscience with the combination of (1) geodynamics codes that can handle increasingly complex properties and geometries and (2) the availability of new observational data from projects such as Earthscope and the Cascadia Initiative.  I am particularly interested in helping to guide the development of tools for Long-Term Tectonics and looking at how to integrate models of different parts of the Earth system (e.g., mantle convection - short/long-term lithosphere dynamics - surface processes).  My own research focuses on the structure and dynamics of convergent plate margins and continental lithosphere.

 

Science Steering Committee

Position 1:

Moritz Heimpel, University of Alberta. Website 
My research involves computational modelling of planetary interiors. Having worked with developers of the dynamo code MagIC, I have seen great advances in code development as well as in computer power. At the same time the scientific communities of Earth and planetary geodynamics, geophysical fluid dynamics, and solar and stellar astrophysics increasingly collaborate and use similar computational codes and tools. I see CIG as a leading organization that fosters this integration of our scientific communities. Serving on the SSC would allow me the opportunity to participate in the continuing progress of earth-planetary-stellar science.  

Sabine Stanley, University of Toronto. Website 
As a member of the CIG Science Steering Committee, my main goal would be to promote and improve community usability of CIG-developed software packages. I consider myself more of a “user” of available codes than a “developer” of new codes so I would strive to ensure CIG is meeting its potential for community users. Over the past 1.5 years I have served on the CIG Geodynamo Working Group and am therefore familiar with CIG’s goals and mission. In addition to geodynamo modelling, I am also developing peripheral new interests in harnessing methods from machine learning and citizen science for large dataset analysis.

Position 2:

Katie Cooper, Washington State University. Website
I have served as the chair of the Long Term Tectonics Working Group since 2014 and as an active member since 2012.  During this time, I helped organize the first workshop dedicated to lithospheric modeling (2014 CIG-EarthScope Institute for Lithospheric Modeling Workshop) as well as led a publication in GSA Today summarizing the key outcomes from  that workshop and suggesting opportunities for growth as a community (Cooper et al., 2015).  I have been active in CIG since its beginnings as an early career scientist taking advantage of its opportunities to building an institutional membership for my university and to more recently engaging within working groups.  I look forward to continuing to serving CIG and its community members during the transition to CIG III.  I am an Associate Professor at Washington State University studying lithospheric dynamics, mantle convection and planetary evolution. 

Margarete Jadamec, University of Houston. Website  
The Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics, CIG, has played a critical role in Earth system science over the last 10 years. I have been a user of the Citcom family of codes since 2003. During my PhD, CIG provided the opportunity to run larger-scale jobs through a then TeraGrid, now XSEDE, allocation available to the community. I have since embraced high-performance computing and code development, regularly running jobs of hundreds to thousands of cores, and written my own software to construct three-dimensional models of plate boundaries in double- and triple-junction settings. I have been a member of the CIG Computational Science Working Group since 2013 and the Mantle Convection Working Group since 2014. As a member of the Science Steering Committee, I would continue to drive CIG forward, in particular in the direction of developing scientific workflows for complex geophysical applications, encouraging sharing of code development through version control, facilitating the conceptualization of large-scale data through 3D data visualization, and continuing to investigate mantle dynamics through high-resolution 3D modeling.

Position 3:

Boris Kaus, University of Mainz. Website  
I'm interested in using computational models to understand geological processes, particularly on a crustal and lithospheric scale. Over the last 15 years, I have developed a range of software packages to simulate such processes (using various numerical techniques), and employed the codes to understand the underlying physics. In recent years, my group looked at mantle-lithosphere interaction, the effect of erosion on tectonics, developed a new massively parallel 3D code to simulate lithospheric deformation with visco-elasto-plastic rheologies, developed inversion approaches to directly link models with (geophysical) data, and looked at new ways to model magma migration through a deforming heterogeneous lithosphere.
In addition, I have trained a considerable number of undergraduate and graduate students, many of them with little prior mathematical background, in writing such codes and in using them to solve geological questions.
At CIG, I believe my experience in developing and using such software will be particularly useful for the long-term tectonics community. In addition, I am believe that progress in the community will benefit from an increased teaching effort, in which CIG could play a key role.

Cédric Thieulot, Utrecht University. Website 
My research interests include understanding long-term lithospheric deformation and its coupling with the underlying mantle through numerical modeling. I have helped developing and/or written my own code(s) since 2008 and I am a user (and contributor) to the CIG ASPECT code since 2012. Along with people in our group in Utrecht, I have been working on implementing/testing various features in ASPECT so as to use it for crustal & lithospheric deformation. I have taken part in both ASPECT hackathons (Texas, 2014; California, 2015), given several poster/oral presentations on our work at international conferences, and am committed to further establish ASPECT as a major player in the next generation of long-term tectonics codes.