Elections 2021
2021 Nominating Committee
- Jacky Austermann, Chair, Columbia University
- Max Rudolph, University of California, Davis
- Carl Tape, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
2021 Slate of Candidates
Executive Committee
EC 1
Carolina Lithgow-Bertelloni [website]
The next decades will pose scientific and societal challenges and opportunities that will need intense engagement from the Earth Sciences computational community, both for understanding the Earth system and its interactions and for training an intellectually and demographically diverse generation of geoscientists. My international experience, my recent service on the CORES committee will allow me to bring a different perspective to CIG. I welcome the opportunity.
Louis Moresi [website]
CIG began with a small group of people dedicated to the idea of making more reliable, flexible and efficient software for the geodynamics community. With time that vision has become much broader and now CIG is focused as much on building a strong community of practice as it is on computational tools. I think this is just the beginning and the next chapter of CIG will need to have a much larger footprint: training the next generation of quantitative geoscientists, bringing research tools into the classroom, and making published results immediately re-usable. In recent years, I have built an international user community around the Underworld software tools – experience that will be invaluable to the coming phase of CIG.
EC 2
Brad Aagaard [website]
I am interested in helping CIG transition into its new form, which will hopefully be the vision outlined in the CIG-IV proposal. I am excited about a stronger emphasis on education, training, and outreach as well as a renewed effort to increase coordination among the various working groups to improve code design and end-user modeling workflow. I am a strong believer in the mission of CIG and have been involved since its inception. I lead the PyLith development team and the Short-term Crustal Dynamics Working Group. I have previously served on the SSC, and I would welcome the opportunity to serve the CIG community on the EC.
Daniel Peter [website]
CIG is driven by scientists for scientists. Computations have become the third pillar in scientific inquiry, next to theory and experimentation. Whether having numerical simulations done on our laptops, workstations, or largest supercomputers, is just a matter of scale and perspective. In the end, we want the same software codes to run on different systems and focus on scientific questions. I'm a computational geophysicist interested in seismic wave phenomena. Over the last decade, I've become one of the leading developers of the SPECFEM packages, a family of codes to deal with forward and adjoint seismic wave propagation on all scales, from Earth to Moon to Mars.
Our codes are open-source research codes provided by CIG to the Earth science community. These codes are written by geophysicists, contain contributions from everyone interested in advancing them, sometimes messy, and sometimes hard to understand as they incorporate state-of-the-art algorithms hardly published yet. CIG is the main platform for supporting and distributing advanced software tools in our community, hoping to accelerate scientific progress by providing access to the most recent software tools and facilities. Furthermore, this serves an important goal to stimulate reproducible science. It provides a crucial role in the long-term support of these tools, offering training for new users to apply them.
Science Steering Committee
SSC 1
Harriet Lau [website]
My research encompasses topics in global geodynamics focusing on two fundamental quantities that govern mantle dynamics: buoyancy and viscosity. For the former, we explore low frequency seismology (normal modes), tides, and rotational variations which can provide insights into mantle buoyancy. For the latter, we focus on how Earth’s frequency dependent rheological behavior which can be used to better understand processes that act on timescales of minutes to hours to decades (normal modes, tides, and seasonal processes), tens of thousands of years (post glacial rebound), and tectonics (millions of years) – and the important feedbacks related to solid Earth deformation. CIG remains standalone within geophysics in its reach and wide variety of hosted tools. As a personal user of MINEOS, BurnMan, with PhD students that use SPECFEM, Calypso and ASPECT – its value to research cannot be understated. If elected to the Science Steering Committee, I will engage and be a proactive member during this transitional phase of CIG’s mission. Open source and transparent software have been pivotal in driving science within our field. Through the efforts of individual developers, CIG – as a bridge – has provided the necessary platform and community to support this endeavor. I would be honored to play any role in its sustained continuance and growth.
Joyce Sim [website]
Thank you for the nomination. It is my pleasure to stand for the Science Steering Committee elections of CIG. I am a research scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology. My research explores magma dynamics in the mantle particularly at tectonic boundaries using TerraFERMA. I am generally interested in applying fluid dynamics to better understand our Earth and other planetary systems across spatial and temporal scales. I am from Malaysia and came to the States to pursue Earth Science in 2007. After a PhD that took seven years and a postdoc later, I am grateful to be where I am with the support and encouragement of mentors and advisors. I am fortunate this past Summer to have worked with an excellent group of undergraduates and their mentors in the CIG undergraduate Summer research program SMOREs and am genuinely excited for the future. I want to build a diverse, equitable, inclusive and welcoming space at CIG that allows for interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary discussions that can spur innovations in our field. I believe that when we talk to someone with an entirely different perspective, it sparks creative ideas. CIG is in a unique position to build and foster connections. I hope to leverage that for the betterment of our science and infrastructure and provide my expertise in any way I can.
SSC 2
Peter Driscoll [website]
I am a Staff Scientist in the Geophysics Group in the Earth and Planets Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. My research uses evolving 3D dynamo models to investigate the dynamical evolution of Earth and planetary interiors, with a focus on magnetic field generation and evolution. I am chair of the CIG Dynamo Working Group and have been my institutional representative for CIG since 2016. I am interested in serving on the CIG Science Steering Committee to ensure that CIG keeps up with cutting edge advances in computational science, continues to serve as a forum to organize community-specific computational needs and long-term strategies, and promotes the advancement of early career and minority members of the community.
Rakesh K. Yadav [website]
Hello everyone, thanks for taking the time to read my election statement. My research largely focuses on understanding the fluid dynamics and magnetic field generation in the interiors and atmospheres of the Earth, other planets, and stars. I am currently studying how fluid turbulence leads to various amazing features in the atmospheres of Saturn and Jupiter -- they have storms as large as the Earth itself! The primary tool for my research is computational fluid dynamics. It is quite amazing that I get to use some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world and get paid for it!
I wholeheartedly agree with CIG's mission of developing and disseminating software tools for geophysics research. Throughout my career I have been lucky enough to utilize open source codes and I want all researchers to be in a similar situation. I have worked in geo, planetary and stellar astrophysics communities and gathered a diverse set of knowledge. If given the opportunity, I hope to act as an "outsider" and provide a different, and hopefully useful, perspective on various issues relevant to the CIG.
SSC 3
Dave May [website]
I am a computational geophysicist focused on the development of efficient & accurate algorithms, along with open-source software implementations of forward models and reduced order models for studying: the long term dynamics of the lithosphere; seismic cycles; dynamic rupture; wave propagation and landscape evolution. I also develop software tools to enable efficient quantitative analysis of large datasets generated by such forward models.
I am a developer of the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific computation (PETSc), a computational library utilized in numerous CIG software efforts. I have also been involved in numerous CIG activities since 2008 and previously served on the SSC from 2014-2017. I believe that my experience across a board range of geophysical application areas, combined with my involvement in the development of open-source software tools for the Earth sciences and computational science & engineering give me a unique perspective on issues such as software performance, usability, sustainability and reliability which I will bring to the SSC. The advent of CIG-IV is soon upon us and I am eager to dive and get behind its many and varied exciting new initiatives.
Anne Reinarz [website]
My research is at the interface between disciplines: Application science (mechanical engineering and seismology), numerical methods development (fast parallel solvers) and uncertainty quantification (bayesian inverse problems and multifidelity methods). I am an assistant professor in the department of computer science at Durham University. I am one of the lead developers of ExaHyPE (www.exahype.eu), an open-source solver for seismological applications (among others). With my background I hope to complement the SSC's geophysics expertise with knowledge of HPC and fast solvers.
SSC 4 (2 YEAR TERM)
Ebru Bozdag [website]
I am a global and computational seismologist with extensive experience in large-scale 3D seismic wave simulations and full-waveform inversion on various HPC systems. I belong to the first generation of Earth scientists who started their career and training in numerical methods with the open-source software maintained and provided by CIG. I am an active user of SPECFEM packages and contribute to the development of wave propagation solvers and pre- and post-processing tools for full-waveform inversions. I have served on the CIG’s Science Steering Committee since 2019 and have been one of the members of CIG’s Seismology Working Group since 2018. I am also one of the PIs of the NSF-funded SCOPED project to build a computational platform to facilitate large-scale high-performance and cloud computing-based research combined with large seismic datasets in collaboration with CIG.
I would like to continue to serve on the Science Steering Committee to promote further 1) open-source community codes, 2) reproducible science, 3) large-scale workflow management to take full advantage of HPC resources, 4) interdisciplinary research to foster scientific discoveries, 5) training and outreach programs to facilitate the continuation of research, and 6) diversity and inclusion in research and training opportunities.
Qinya Liu [website]
As a computational seismologist working on applying accurate numerical simulations of seismic waves to map the Earth's interior through full-waveform inversions, I became involved with CIG at its inception as a graduate student developing the SPECFEM3D and SPEFEM3D_GLOBE packages. Over the years, like many computational geophysicists, I have benefited tremendously from the involvement in the CIG community, including the numerous workshops and webinars. Interacting with fellow coders and CIG community members, I came to treasure CIG as an invaluable training and development platform built around open-source code sharing, with an emphasis on both scientific and technological advancement and interdisciplinary collaboration.
I am extremely honored to be nominated as a candidate for the Science Steering Committee. As our field continues to embrace the explosion of geophysical data and substantial advances in high-performance computing, I believe CIG is uniquely positioned to bring together the geophysicists and computer scientists to maintain, improve and develop a set of high-quality codes to address critical and challenging scientific problems. I hope to leverage my experience in developing the SPECFEM packages and their inversion capabilities, as well as in high-performance scientific computing and large-scale infrastructure consortia, to facilitate and support the continued development of sustainable open-source community softwares in CIG. I will also continue to advocate for more community involvement by graduate students and early career scientists, and promote a diverse, equitable and inclusive research environment for the community.