News

Research Group News

8/10/24 - New student and postdoc publications to announce! Papers first authored by Jim and Roberto have recently been accepted for publication; these represent the first publications using NEST data (so exciting!). Jonathan Wolf has also had several papers come out recently, including a Reviews of Geophysics paper on D” anisotropy and a paper in EPSL on the distribution of ULVZs and seismic anisotropy beneath North America and the role of subduction-driven flow. Well done, all!

8/8/24 - We just wrapped up a fantastic time at the NEST/GENESIS science workshop in Londonderry, VT this week. We enjoyed presentations, discussions, and field trips involving NEST and GENESIS scientists. Before that, Fred and Maureen spent a day in the field with Yvette and Nikhil looking at Nashoba and Avalonia terrane outcrops and collecting samples for EBSD analysis for the GENESIS project. Lots of exciting science from both GENESIS and NEST is in progress - keep an eye out!

7/19/24 - Maureen, Fred, and Ella just got back from three days of field work with Jim, Roberto, and other Rutgers folks in New Jersey. We were decomissioning broadband and nodal stations of the New Jersey rapid deployment, getting equipment ready to get sent back to the EPIC instrument center in New Mexico.

6/29/24 - Maureen, Jonathan, and Eric just got back from a great week at the Study of the Earth’s Deep Interior (SEDI) symposium, held in Great Barrington, MA. What a great week of thinking about deep Earth problems!

6/3/24 - Undergrad EPS major Victoria Vilton officially starts her full-time summer internship today. Victoria’s been a member of our research group for the last year, but we’re psyched to have her full time for the summer. Victoria works on lithospheric structure beneath Haiti from receiver function analysis and will also be starting a project using data from New England this summer.

5/20/24 - Congratulations to Dr. Yantao Luo, who officially recieved his diploma at the university commencement ceremonies today! I couldn’t be prouder of you!!!

5/3/24 - Maureen had a great time giving a lunchtime seminar at Central Connecticut State University today - wonderful to connect with local colleagues and meet some terrific CCSU students. Thanks for the invite!

4/26/24 - Our group has seen a burst of activity with a deployment of instruments in New Jersey to measure aftershocks of the magnitude 4.8 earthquake a few weeks ago. Partnering with the USGS, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and TexNet at the University of Texas, we’ve been deploying 10 broadband sensors and ~70 nodal sensors. The Yale/Rutgers portion of the project has been led by postdocs Jim Bourke and Fred Link. Stay tuned for some really exciting science that will be coming soon!

4/5/24 - Lots of excitement around the magnitude 4.8 New Jersey earthquake that occurred today. Shaking was felt widely in the northeast U.S., including here at KGL, where our Raspberry Shake recorded the event beautifully. Maureen had a busy day with media interviews - thanks to all the media folks who engaged so thoughtfully. Here’s a clip of an interview Maureen did with CNN if you are interested! 

4/4/24 - And another successful thesis defense to announce - Jonathan Wolf has defended his thesis and will officially graduate in December. An enormous congratulations to the new Dr. Wolf!!

3/27/24 - Jonathan Wolf has published a new paper in Nature Geoscience that shows evidence for an ultra-low velocity zone and slab-driven flow at the base of the mantle beneath the Himalayas. This was published as part of a special collection in Nature Geoscience on mantle heterogeneity, with several associated commentary articles that can be found in the current issue of Nature Geoscience.  Yale News also did a release about the paper. Well done, Jonathan!

3/20/24 - Our group and the collaborative NEST/GENESIS group had a terrific showing at the Geological Society of America Northeast Section meeting in Manchester, NH this week, with a session on geology and geophysics in the Appalachians and lots of presentations. Yale/Rutgers seismologists including Maureen, Fred, Roberto, and Jim attended, along with collaborators Paul, Laura, Yvette, and Suman.

3/9/24 - Our research group was pleased to welcome two friends and collaborators for brief visits this week - we hosted Ben Fernando of Johns Hopkins and Cassandra Seltzer for research visits. Thanks to you both for coming!

2/1/24 - An enormous congratulations to Yantao Luo, who has successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis and who will officially receive his Ph.D. in May. CONGRATS to the new Dr. Luo!

1/22/24 - Maureen just got back from a great visit to give a seminar at the Caltech Seismo Lab - always a pleasure to visit Pasadena!

12/1/23 - MORE student papers to announce - Yantao Luo has had not one, but two papers accepted for publication this week! Keep an eye out for forthcoming publications on layered anisotropy beneath southern New England in G-cubed and along-strike variability in Moho architecture beneath the Appalachian Mountains in JGR. Well done, Yantao!

11/2/23 - Student papers are rolling off the press! Jonathan Wolf has recently published papers on differential PS-SKS splitting and on a global compilation of deep mantle anisotropy measurements, while Annie Haws’s paper on seismic anisotropy in the flat-slab and normally-dipping segments of the Alaska subduction zone has just been accepted for publication - keep an eye out!

10/25/23 - Maureen gave the Harrington STEM Lecture at SUNY New Paltz yesterday - thanks to Gordana Garapic for hosting a terrific visit!

10/19/23 - Maureen just got back from a terrific trip to Pittsburgh for the Geological Society of America meeting (GSA Connects 2023), where she gave talks on broadband seismic deployments in New England and mental health in the geosciences. She also cheered on her collaborator Yvette Kuiper and her stepsister Sarah Principato as they became GSA Fellows!

7/28/23 - We just wrapped up our Summer 2023 field season for the NEST project, having installed seven new seismic stations in Massachusetts and Vermont and decommissioned four. Thanks to Jim, Fred, Eric, Jonathan, Kim, Roberto, and Ella for being a fantastic field crew.

7/5/23 - Maureen just returned from a terrific visit to Iceland with the Yale Alumni Association - what a trip! Highlights included the basalt formations of the Snaefellsnes Peninsula, a visit to the Arctic Circle on Grimsey, the Myvatn Valley and the Northern Volcanic Zone, the glacier lagoon at Jokulsarlon, and the site of the 1973 volcanic eruption on Heimaey Island. And Maureen gave several lectures on plate tectonics, the geology of Iceland, and climate change on board our ship, Le Bellot. Truly amazing!

6/23/23 - That’s a wrap on the 2023 Interior of the Earth Gordon Research Conference! The conference was chaired by Maureen and was attended by a number of our group members, including postdocs Fred, Eric, and Jim and grad students Jonathan, Kim, and Roberto, all of whom presented posters at the conference. 

6/15/23 - Many of our research group members just got back from a terrific field school/workshop for the NEST and GENESIS projects. We installed the final station of the GENESIS array in Concord, MA, looked at outcrops in the Nashoba Terrane of eastern MA and in western MA and southern VT, and spent a great day at Williams College sharing results and plans for the two projects.

6/12/23 - Undergrad researcher Ella Xu, who has been working in our group for several months, officially started her full-time summer internship today. Ella will continue to work with Maureen and Jonathan on investigations of lowermost mantle anisotropy beneath Australia using beamformed SmKS and Sdiff phases. 

5/25/23 - Congratulations to Dr. Jim Bourke (Rutgers), Roberto Masis Arce (Rutgers), and Rajani Shrestha (Delaware), all of whom had successful thesis defenses in the past week. Maureen was proud to be a committee member for all three of them! Jim is going to stay at Rutgers as a postdoc working on the NEST project, co-advised by Maureen; Roberto is going to stay on at Rutgers to complete his Ph.D., co-advised by Maureen, and Rajani is heading to Caltech for her Ph.D. program. Congrats, all! 

4/21/23 - Yale EPS was delighted to play host to a STEM 101 for Parents event yesterday. This event, co-sponsored by the Ethnic Online STEM Foundation, New Haven Promise, and Yale EPS, featured fun and interactive demos for kids and a program for parents focused on STEM careers and developing children’s interest in STEM. Maureen, as well as fellow Yale EPS faculty member Ruth Blake, served on the planning committee for this terrific event. We were delighted to work with Leonard Webb, the head of the Ethnic Online STEM Foundation, Patricia Melton, the head of New Haven Promise, and the rest of the organizing committee.

4/19/23 - Yesterday was Women in EPS day, which featured a fantastic keynote talk by Prof. Rachel Bernard of Amherst College, plus talks from many of the amazing women and non-binary scientists in the EPS department. Maureen, Kim, and Lex from our group all gave talks.

4/15/23 - Maureen just got back from a great trip to Chicago for the final meeting of the Ivy+ Faculty Advancement Network Institute on Equity, Inquiry, and Leadership in the Academic Department. This year-long institute focused on making science departments more equitable and inclusive. 

4/4/23 - It was fun to host friend and collaborator Thorsten Becker here at Yale for an informal visit - thanks, Thorsten!

1/31/23 - We installed the fifth (out of six) station of the GENESIS experiment, very exciting! The GENESIS field work is being led by postdoc Fred Link and is going great so far - can’t wait for some initial science results!

12/19/22 - As usual, we had a great week at AGU, with Kim, Yantao, Jonathan, Fred, Eric, Lex, and Maureen all presenting their research at the conference. We also had a great dinner in Chicago with current and former group members - always a highlight!

11/23/22 - New broadband seismic experiment just dropped! The first four stations of the GENESIS (GEology of New England via Seismic Imaging Studies) array werre installed this week in Massachusetts. This project, done in collaboration with Yvette Kuiper at the Colorado School of Mines, will study the geologic evolution of the Nashoba Terrane. A huge thanks to Fred, Eric, and Yantao for doing amazing work as the field crew!

11/20/22 - Maureen just returned from a terrific week in Norway for the Centre for Earth Evolution and Dynamics symposium on Earth’s History, Dynamics, and Planetary Habitability. 

10/2/22 - Maureen just participated in a kickoff workshop for the Faculty Advancement Network’s Institute for Inquiry, Equity, and Leadership in the Academic Department. This program will run through Spring 2023 and involves chairs of STEM departments learning together about how to make our departments more equitable and inclusive. 

9/8/22 - The Every Rock Has a Story episode is now out! You can check it out on the ERHAS Youtube channel. 

8/18/22 - The Second National Conference on Justice in Geoscience took place this week in Washington, DC. Grad student Kim Espinal attended in person, while Maureen and other EPS department members watched the plenary talks which were open to all. The plenary talks and performances were absolutely fantastic - some of the best presentations I’ve ever seen on any topic. I particularly recommend the talks by Black in Marine Science founder and CEO Tiara Moore and environmental justice activist Nalleli Cobo. You can still watch the on-demand plenary talks on the conference website. 

8/12/22 - Maureen had a blast yesterday filming an episode of Every Rock Has a Story with Prof. Ethan Baxter from BC. We visited a seismic station in Shelburne Falls, MA, and hiked to the Laurentian suture in Florida, MA. I had SUCH a great time and can’t wait for the episode to be out - it will be the first episode of Season 3, dropping on September 8. You can catch a trailer for Season 3 as well as some behind-the-scenes footage from filming on the ERHAS Youtube channel.  

8/3/22 - New student-led papers are rolling off the press, with Yantao Luo’s recent paper on GRT-based wavefield migration imaging beneath the SEISConn array, and Jonathan Wolf’s recent paper at EPSL on slab-driven flow in the lowermost mantle beneath the northeastern Pacific Ocean. Congratulations, Yantao and Jonathan!

8/1/22 - The first NEST project meeting is officially in the books! A group of 14 scientists from Yale, Rutgers, Williams, Vermont, and Binghamton just spent two and a half fabulous days in North Conway, NH discussing ongoing and planned work for NEST and related projects in New England. Before the workshop, we spent three days in the field servicing NEST stations and finding new sites for the eastern extension of the NEST array in Massachusetts. Thanks to all our amazing colleagues for a fabulous week.

6/23/22 - The GENESIS seismic experiment is officially underway! We recently received word that the GEology of New England via Seismic Imaging Studies (GENESIS) project has been recommended for funding by NSF, and we are thrilled. We’ll be collaborating with Yvette Kuiper at the Colorado School of Mines to undertake a detailed study of channel flow and ductile extrusion in the Nashoba Terrane of Massachusetts. Wasting no time, Maureen and Yvette just spent two days in our field area finding sites for seismometer installations this fall. Stay tuned for more news from GENESIS coming soon!

6/17/22 - Yale seismologists showed up in force to the SAGE-GAGE Community Science Workshop in Pittsburgh this week. Not only did Maureen, Frederik, Kim, and Yantao enjoy the meeting, but we also enjoyed an awesome road trip out there with our Rutgers seismology buddies. Haven’t had that much fun driving across the entire state of Pennsylvania in a long time… :)

6/10/22 - A gang of Yale seismologists just got back from a few days of field work in New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts, visiting stations of the NEST array to check on station health and swap data cards. A new batch of NEST data will soon be on its way to the IRIS DMC for archiving. Thanks Kim, Yantao, Jonathan, Eric, Frederik, Berit, Paleena, and Dede for being such a great field crew!

6/7/22 - Welcome Yale seismology summer interns! We are happy to have three undergraduate students working in our group for the summer. Our summer colleagues include Berit Olsson, a student at Williams College, Paleena Amy, a student at Washington College, and Dede Chapline, a student at Pomona College. Paleena and Dede are part of the Yale SURF program. Welcome to all of you - we’re happy to have you here for the summer!

6/2/22 - A big welcome to Dr. Eric Loeberich, who is joining our group this week as a postdoc. Eric comes to us from the University of Vienna, where he recently finished his Ph.D. Eric will be working on our newly funded subduction zone anisotropy project as well as other projects related to imaging anisotropy in the upper mantle. Welcome, Eric!

5/23/22 - Maureen just returned from Rick Carlson’s retirement symposium at the Carnegie Institution for Science (known fondly as Rick Fest). I was delighted to be able to give a talk and pay tribute to an amazing scientist and person who has been a cheerleader and mentor to me over my career, despite the fact that I was never officially his postdoc. Here’s to a fantastic retirement, Rick!

5/5/22 - A hearty welcome to Dr. Frederik Link, who joins us as a postdoctoral researcher from the Goethe University Frankfurt, where he recently obtained his Ph.D. Frederik will be working on imaging seismic anisotropy in the upper mantle via shear wave splitting intensity tomography and other approaches during his postdoc here. Welcome, Frederik!

4/5/22 - Welcome to Regina Maass, who is joining our group for two months as a visiting graduate student. Regina has just finished her master’s degree at the University of Hamburg and will be heading to Dublin to start her Ph.D. at the conclusion of her stay in New Haven. She will be working on analyzing the (anthropogenic and natural) noise characteristics of stations of the NEST array. Welcome, Reggie!

3/25/22 - Several of us just got back from the Northeastern Section meeting of the Geological Society of America in Lancaster, PA. We had a great time participating in (and convening!) sessions on the Appalachians and presenting results from the SEISConn and NEST projects.

3/10/22 - And another piece of good news - our collaborative project on subduction zone anisotropy with Phil Skemer (Washington University in St. Louis) and Laurent Montesi (University of Maryland) has been funded by the CSEDI program of NSF. We’re looking forward to carrying out some excellent multidisciplinary science on this project over the next few years!

3/8/22 - Maureen enjoyed the first meeting of her AGU Mentoring Network group today. The group will meet monthly over the course of the year to talk about career planning, work-life balance, and other important topics. I look forward to learning and growing with this great group of students, postdocs, research scientists, and faculty members over the next year.

2/20/22 - We’ve gotten some terrific news from NSF - our collaborative project with Vadim Levin (Rutgers), Paul Karabinos (Williams), and Laura Webb (Vermont) to analyze data from the NEST array and integrate seismic imaging with geological constraints has been recommended for funding. We are thrilled that we are now an NSF-funded project and can’t wait to do some terrific science together!

12/20/21 - Many of us just returned from our first in-person scientific conference in two years, with a trip to the AGU Fall Meeting in New Orleans. Maureen, Yantao, Jonathan, and Kim presented on topics including lithospheric loss beneath the Central Appalachians, along-strike variability in Appalachian structure and tectonic history, using beamformed SmKS phases to study anisotropy in the lowermost mantle, mantle earthquakes beneath the East African Rift, and the accomplishments of the Yale URGE pod.

12/6/21 - The last service run of 2021 for the NEST array just wrapped up this weekend, with Maureen, Jonathan, and visitor Regina Maass visiting stations in Shelburne Falls, MA, Alton Bay, NH, Lebanon, ME, and Sanford, ME. All the data we collected will be on its way to the IRIS DMC soon so we can do some awesome science with it.

11/29/21 - Some exciting new collaborative papers have been rolling off the press over the past few weeks! Former grad student Neala Creasy, now at the Colorado School of Mines, published a paper on lowermost mantle flow directions beneath Siberia (Creasy et al., G-cubed, 2021). A collaborative group of geophysicists, geochemists, and geomorphologists published a synthesis of constraints on lithospheric loss beneath the Central Appalachian Mountains (Long et al., JGR, 2021). And Maureen collaborated with a group of scientists led by Eric Loeberich to study olivine fabrics in the upper mantle beneath the Cascadia backarc (Loeberich et al., G-cubed, 2021).

9/26/21 - Maureen is just back from a quick weekend jaunt to the field - she installed a new NEST station in Rupert, VT with co-PIs Vadim Levin and Paul Karabinos, and then serviced stations in Williamstown, MA and Florida, MA. The NEST array now has 15 stations operating, with more installations planned for 2022.

9/4/21 - A hearty welcome to Kimberly Espinal, who has just arrived at Yale to start her Ph.D. program. Kim comes to us from Franklin and Marshall College, where she was a double major in physics and geoscience. Kim also worked with Simon Klemperer at Stanford as a SURGE intern. Kim is planning to work on data from the NEST array, with a focus on understanding the origin and dynamics of the Northern Appalachian Anomaly. Welcome, Kim!

8/30/21 - And another terrific student publication to announce - Ph.D. student Jonathan Wolf has just published an excellent study of the sensitivity of SKS, SKKS, and ScS phases to anisotropy in the lowermost mantle. Jonathan used the AxiSEM3D global wavefield modeling code for this work, which was done in collaboration with Kuangdai Leng and Tarje Nissen-Meyer at Oxford. Congratulations, Jonathan!

8/22/21 - Just got done with the terrific virtual GAGE-SAGE Community Science Workshop - Maureen was a member of the organizing committee. It was a great meeting, with sessions on Earth interfaces, transient behavior, and big geophysical datasets, and terrific small-group sessions on diversity and inclusion and workplace climate, among other topics.

8/14/21 - Maureen just got back from a four-day trip to the field to install and repair stations of the NEST array! We installed new stations in Warner, NH and Sanford, ME, and repaired a station in Lebanon, ME. Thanks to our great field crew of Roberto, Jim, Will, and Vadim!

7/19/21 - Congrats to grad student Yantao Luo, who just published an excellent paper in JGR describing detailed receiver function imaging of the lithosphere beneath southern New England based on SEISConn data. The interpretation was done in collaboration with geologists Paul Karabinos and Yvette Kuiper, and the imaging was done in collaboration with Stephane Rondenay and others - thanks to all our co-authors on this work.

6/15/21 - I had a terrific time giving a virtual presentation to the Warrior-Scholar Project group that met this week at Yale. The Warrior-Scholar Project offers one- to two-week programs for enlisted veterans and service members who are transitioning to higher ed. I gave a talk to the scholars participating in Yale’s STEM week on the science of seismology and the amazing story told by New England’s geology. Thanks for having me and for your terrific questions and discussion after the talk!

6/11/21 - I had a great time at the (virtual) Rift2Ridge meeting this week - the extensional tectonics community had a terrific meeting that focused on future directions, exciting new science, and the importance of diversity and equity initiatives to the future of our field. 

6/4/21 - It’s just been announced that I will be taking over (from my terrific colleague Dave Bercovici) as Chair of the Earth and Planetary Sciences department at Yale as of July 1 of this year. I’m looking forward to this new challenge and am eager to serve the EPS department in this new role.

5/21/21 - A huge congratulations to Puskar Mondal on his successful thesis defense yesterday! The new Dr. Puskar will remain at Yale for the summer, finishing up some papers, and will start a postdoc in the math department at Harvard in the fall. Congratulations, Puskar!

5/20/21 - We had an excellent seminar in the EPS department yesterday on mental health awareness given by Dr. Paul Hoffman, the head of Mental Health and Counseling at Yale Health. It was great to have an opportunity to come together as a department to learn about mental health challenges in academic settings and hear about the resources that are available for support here at Yale.

5/18/21 - Check out this awesome IRIS Science Highlight on the MAGIC experiment! Thanks Alka and IRIS for spotlighting the work we’ve done in the Central Appalachians with the MAGIC array!

5/16/21 - I was lucky to spend a gorgeous day yesterday working in the field, servicing stations of the NEST array in western Massachusetts. It was great to see collaborators Vadim and Paul in person after a very long time, and terrific to get our hands on another batch of NEST data to send to the IRIS DMC.

5/11/21 - A huge congrats to Jonathan and Yantao who both passed their Ph.D. qualifying exams over the past week! Woohoo!

5/7/21 - We had the last official meeting of the Yale EPS URGE pod today, and had a terrific discussion of the deliverables that we’ve developed over the course of the semester. The EPS IDEA committee is working with the URGE pod to make documents available on the department website and to suggest and implement changes to departmental policies and procedures. I’m excited about what our URGE pod has accomplished this semester and energized for the work ahead.

3/19/21 - I had a great time at the virtual GSA Northeastern Section meeting earlier this week - there were several awesome sessions devoted to the Appalachians and related topics. Current grad student Yantao and former undergrad intern Ethan gave terrific presentations on their latest work using SEISConn data.

2/10/21 - I’m delighted to be taking over from my amazing colleague Ruth Blake as the chair of the EPS Department IDEA (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Anti-Racism/Anti-Discrimination) Committee. I can’t wait to work with the rest of the committee members this semester on new projects and initiatives in the DEI space.

1/29/21 - We just had an awesome first meeting of the Yale URGE pod, what a great discussion!  URGE stands for Unlearning Racism in the Geosciences; it’s a community-wide journal-reading and policy-design curriculum that is aimed at improving accessibility, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in our field, with a focus on anti-racism work. I’m excited to spend the next sixteen weeks learning and developing new policies with the Yale URGE pod.  

12/19/20 - Check out our new paper on SKS splitting beneath the SEISConn array, first-authored by Ethan Lopes, which has just come out in G-cubed. Ethan was a summer undergraduate intern in our group, and he continued his project as his senior thesis at Williams. Super exciting to see his research culminate in a peer-reviewed paper - congrats, Ethan!

12/17/20 - The virtual Fall AGU meeting marathon is drawing to a close - it’s been a busy couple of weeks! Grad students Yantao and Jonathan each presented posters, and I had a great time checking out presentations and workshops. Highlights included a panel on the film Picture a Scientist and a workshop on Exploring Challenges to Diversifying Faculty. 

11/14/20 - It was an exciting week for this Connecticut seismologist - a magnitude 3.6 earthquake this past Sunday near New Bedford, MA was widely felt across Connecticut (here’s an interview with yours truly if you’re interested in more information!). I also gave a (virtual) talk yesterday at the Geological Society of Connecticut annual meeting - it was exciting to share results from the SEISConn experiment with fellow Connecticut geology enthusiasts.

10/30/20 - I had a good time at the Geological Society of America virtual meeting this week - gave a couple of talks, and helped to convene an awesome session on the structure and dynamics of the Appalachians. We’re all adjusting to the new normal of virtual meetings, but GSA pulled it off!

9/30/20 - A big congrats to Yale alum Sarah Arveson, who was a recipient of this year’s AGU SEDI Graduate Research Award. Sarah did her minor discourse project with Maureen and was part of the field crew for the MAGIC experiment demobilization. Congratulations, Sarah! (It’s also the third year in a row that a Yale student or alum has been honored with the award, woohoo!)

9/18/20 - I was delighted to give a COMPRES Keynote lecture on deep mantle structure and dynamics this week - check out the recording if you’re interested!

8/26/20 - First publications from the SEISConn experiment are coming out! A Data Mine paper on the experiment has recently been published, and a paper led by collaborators Haiying Gao of UMass and Xiaotao Yang of Purdue has just been published in GRL. Our GRL paper shows evidence for the emplacement of mafic material at the base of the crust beneath the Hartford Basin during the breakup of Pangea. We’ve also just submitted a paper, first-authored by former undergrad intern Ethan Lopes, describing SKS splitting across the SEISConn array - so stay tuned!

8/20/20 - We had a fantastic departmental workshop/discussion on racial equity yesterday that followed up on a FLY/YAAA-sponsored workshop that took place a couple of weeks ago. We had constructive and frank conversations in small groups about microagressions, privilege, and strategies for interrupting racism. I’m excited to be learning and committing to anti-racist actions in my department and university community (and beyond).

6/30/20 - Keely O’Farrell at the University of Kentucky has put together a great virtual seminar series in geophysics and tectonics - check out the archive and schedule of talks, including videos of past talks (including one this week by yours truly). What a great resource for the community during the Covid era… 

6/17/20 - Maureen has been recognized as a Finalist of the 2020 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists - I’m delighted by this honor!

6/9/20 - Like many of us, I’ve been struggling to process the horror of the death of George Floyd and have been energized by the protest movement against police brutality and anti-Black racism. I support the Black Lives Matter movement and efforts to fight racism in academia, in STEM, and in the geosciences specifically.  Right now I’m working to listen, to educate myself, and to identify actions that I can take personally and as a member of the EPS department to enhance diversity, to fight against racism, and to make Yale and EPS a welcoming place for all scientists.

5/27/20 - Congratulations to Yale College grads Kat Lutz ‘20 and Sam Borden ‘20, both members of our research group! Kat, an astrophysics major, is headed to Dartmouth in the fall to start graduate work in planetary science. Her paper on SKS-SKKS splitting discrepancies beneath North America has just been published in PEPI. Sam, a physics major, is headed to University of Washington in the fall to start a Ph.D. in physics.  He’s currently working on a paper on his application of SKS splitting intensity tomography to data from South America. Congrats, Kat and Sam!

5/22/20 - Congratulations to Ethan Lopes, Williams College ‘20, for finishing his senior thesis! Ethan’s thesis was co-advised by Maureen and by Paul Karabinos at Williams, and examined SKS splitting beneath stations of the SEISConn array. We’ll be working on turning Ethan’s thesis into a paper that will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal this summer - stay tuned!

4/30/20 - Several publications led by students or postdocs in our group have been published this spring. You can check out work by former student Andrea Servali on quasi-Love wave observations in eastern North America, current student Puskar Mondal on SKS splitting tomography beneath Cascadia, former student Neala Creasy on models of elasticity at the base of the mantle, and former postdoc Andrea Tesoniero on full-wave sensitivity of SK(K)S phases to abritrary anisotropy in the upper and lower mantle.

3/14/20 - Maureen just returned from an awesome spring break field trip to the central Appalachian Mountains with a group of students from the fall Natural Disasters class. Our original plans to go to the Azores were scuttled by the coronavirus, but we had a fantastic time exploring Virginia and West Virginia. Highlights included fossil hunting (for stromatolites, brachiopods, and trilobites), hiking on Grenville aged rocks on Old Rag Mountain in Shenandoah National Park, checking out the Eocene Mole Hill basalt, touring Luray Caverns, hiking in Monongahela National Forest, and visiting the Green Bank Telescope. Thanks Cindy, Mary, Frankie, Grace, Gaby, and David, and co-leaders Dave, Elvira, and Sophie, for an amazing trip to the Azores of America!

3/5/20 - Maureen visited Williams College earlier this week to give a seminar in the Geosciences Department and work with collaborators Paul Karabinos and Ethan Lopes, who is completing a senior thesis on SKS splitting beneath the SEISConn array. Thanks for a great visit!

2/4/20 - Maureen had a great visit to the Graduate School of Oceanography at URI last week to give an MG&G seminar talk - thanks for hosting me!

12/17/19 - The AGU Fall Meeting was a whirlwind as usual - it was great to be back in San Francisco this year. Our group and collaborators presented talks and posters on lowermost mantle anisotropy, crustal and lithospheric structure beneath southern New England, and applications of finite-frequency SKS splitting intensity tomography. We also had a chance to cheer on Neala Creasy at the joint SEDI/MRP reception as she received the SEDI Graduate Research Award!

11/27/19 - There’s nothing like a little Thanksgiving break field work! Along with Yale grad student Yantao and collaborator Paul Karabinos at Williams, Maureen just spent several days servicing stations of the NEST experiment in New England. The 12 stations we have running are all ready to go for winter, and we expect to install the remaining ~7 stations in 2020. 

11/21/19 - Maureen had a fantastic trip to Europe last week, making stops in Cambridge to give a geophysics seminar at Bullard Laboratories (thanks Alistair and Jenny for hosting!) and at the University of Muenster to work with collaborators (thanks Tine!) and give a talk at the Deep Earth Mini Symposium. 

11/7/19 - Thanks to the Branford Rotary Club for hosting Maureen for a talk yesterday, it was great to talk to your group about Connecticut geology and the SEISConn project.

10/1/19 - New observations of lowermost mantle anisotropy have just been published by our group! You can check out former postdoc Miriam Reiss’ paper on D” anisotropy in the vicinity of the African LLSVP, and current Ph.D. student Jonathan Wolf’s paper on anisotropy at the base of the mantle beneath Iceland (based on work he did here as an undergrad intern). Recent grad Neala Creasy is a co-author on both papers; while you’re at it, check out Neala’s paper from earlier this year on synthetic modeling of body wave observations of D” anisotropy.

9/15/19 - Congratulations to Neala Creasy, who had a successful Ph.D. defense last week! Neala is heading to Colorado soon to start an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Colorado School of Mines, working with Ebru Bozdag. Great work, Dr. Creasy!

9/9/19 - Maureen just got back from a great trip to Colorado School of Mines to give a colloquium talk and work with collaborators there - thanks to Yvette Kuiper for hosting and for a fantastic couple of days of talking about the tectonic evolution of New England.

9/1/19 - Welcome to Yantao Luo and Jonathan Wolf, who have just started their Ph.D. programs at Yale working in Maureen’s group. Yantao is going to be working on imaging the crust and upper mantle beneath New England using data from SEISConn and NEST, and Jonathan is going to be working on seismic anisotropy and mantle dynamics in the lowermost mantle. Great to have you both here!

8/25/19 - We’ve just wrapped up a great summer field season for the NEST project (New England Seismic Transects) - we now have 11 broadband stations operating, with 6 in western Massachusetts and 5 on the Vermont/New Hampshire/Maine line. Stay tuned for updates!

8/6/19 - Thanks to all the participants in the 2019 editions of the Field Experiences for Science Teachers (FEST) program! We just wrapped up two back-to-back sessions of the program, which involves Connecticut-based high school science teachers in seismology field experiments. Thanks Dawn, Stacey, Jill, Nick, Susan, and JR for your hard work and your contributions to the SEISConn and NEST experiments!

8/1/19 - A huge congratulations to Neala Creasy, who was named as a recipient of this year’s Graduate Research Award from the Study of the Earth’s Deep Interior (SEDI) section of the American Geophysical Union. It’s the second year in a row that a Yale graduate student has received the award (Jie Deng was a recipient last year). Congratulations to Neala on this honor!

7/15/19 - Several new papers describing results from the MAGIC experiment have recently come out! These include Maureen’s paper on our discovery of a mid-crustal shear zone associated with the Grenville orogeny, collaborator Joe Byrnes’ paper on attenution structure beneath the array, and collaborator Rob Evans’ paper on lithospheric structure from electrical conductivty and Sp receiver functions. The latter two papers were published in EPSL as a two-part series on lithospheric loss beneath the Central Appalachians. 

7/7/19 - Maureen just got back from a great trip to Shenzhen, China, to give a keynote talk at a summer school on Earth and planetary interiors at the Southern University of Science and Technology. 

6/5/19 - Welcome to summer interns Ethan Lopes and Dan Allen, who recently started their internships in our group. Ethan is a rising senior at Williams College who will be working on seismic data from Connecticut as part of his senior thesis research. Dan is a student at Highline Community College who is part of the REVU (Research Experiences for Veteran Undergraduates) program at Yale. Dan’s project is aimed at looking for complex seismic anisotropy in the upper mantle beneath southern New England. Both Ethan and Dan will be involved with field work for the SEISConn and NEST experiments this summer.

5/22/19 - Maureen was delighted to be recognized this year with the Graduate Mentor Award in the natural sciences by the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Thank you to my amazing graduate students from over the years who nominated me for the award!

4/1/19 - Thanks to the Earth and Environmental Science department at Lehigh University for hosting Maureen for a colloquium talk last week - it was a great visit!

3/21/19 - Maureen just got back from a fantastic trip to the Geological Society of America Northeast Section meeting in Portland, ME - lots of great talks on Appalachian structure and tectonics, including a terrific session on integrating geological and geophysical constraints in the Appalachians.

3/13/19 - Thanks to the Rutgers seismology group for hosting Maureen for a visit yesterday; we had a great time talking  about exciting new science results from the SEISConn experiment and planning new field adventures for the NEST experiment this coming summer.

3/3/19 - Maureen had an excellent time at the GeoPRISMS Theoretical and Experimental Institute meeting on Synthesis and Integration in San Antonio last week - lots of great ideas and discussion about how to synthesize results from the GeoPRISMS program! We presented a poster on results from the MAGIC experiment, which was jointly funded by GeoPRISMS and EarthScope. It was terrific to see former Ph.D. student Colton Lynner at the meeting.

2/1/19 - Maureen had a very productive visit to the University of Massachusetts yesterday to work with collaborators on new results from the SEISConn experiment, and implications for the tectonic evolution of southern New England. Thanks to Haiying Gao, Xiaotao Yang, Cong Li, and Mike Williams for some great discussions - and stay tuned for some exciting papers coming down the pike.

1/25/19 - Several exciting student-led publications to announce! Puskar Mondal’s paper on SKS splitting tomography of the upper mantle has just been published in GJI; Neta Bar’s paper on anisotropic receiver function analysis beneath Peru and Bolivia has just been published in Tectonophysics; Neala Creasy’s paper on using body wave phases to constrain lowermost mantle anisotropy has just been accepted for publication in GJI. Congratulations, guys!

12/20/18 - As usual, our group had a busy week at the AGU Fall Meeting this year. Collectively, we presented work on the SEISConn project, modeling anisotropy at the base of the mantle, full wavefield modeling with the AxiSEM3D code, SKS splitting intensity tomography, results from the MAGIC experiment, and the FEST program.

12/1/18 - A fond farewell to postdoc Miriam Reiss, who is headed back to Frankfurt this week. Miriam was here for six months on a short-term postdoctoral scholarship from Germany. A paper based on her research at Yale on lowermost mantle structure beneath Africa will be submitted soon - stay tuned for details!

11/13/18 - Maureen had a great time at the Connecticut Science Educators Conference this past weekend, co-convening an exciting session with Susan Kelly on cultivating teacher-scientist partnerships.

10/22/18 - Maureen just had a terrific visit to western Massachusetts for some fall break field work, installing seismic stations for the NEST experiment with collaborators Vadim Levin of Rutgers and Paul Karabinos of Williams. Thanks to Paul for hosting us!

9/15/18 - An enormous THANK YOU to a group of seismologists from Yale and Rutgers (Miriam, Yiran, Zhenxin, and Xiaoran), who spent three days this week servicing the SEISConn array in northern Connecticut. A new batch of SEISConn data will be sent to the IRIS DMC soon for analysis. We have one more year of data collection for SEISConn, and some preliminary results from the project will be presented at the AGU Fall Meeting in December.

8/30/18 - A fond farewell to Andrea Tesoniero, who finished up his time as a postdoctoral researcher at Yale and is moving back to Europe with his family. Andrea’s work at Yale focused on the implementation of arbitrary anisotropy into the AxiSEM3D wavefield modeling code, and a study of the finite-frequency effects of lowermost mantle anisotropy on SK(K)S waveforms. Andrea, we will miss you!

8/17/18 - Congratulations to Andrea Servali, who has just turned in his M.S. thesis and recently moved out to California, where he will be pursuing an internship in data science and putting his great data analysis skills to work!

8/13/18 - We just finished up an absolutely fantastic joint geology and geophysics workshop/field trip with colleagues from Rutgers, Williams, the Colorado School of Mines, and the University of Massachusetts. We visited outcrops in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, installed a seismic station in New Hampshire, and made plans for new collaborations to combine constraints from geology and seismology to understand the tectonic history and processes of New England.

7/11/18 - Hello from the CIDER summer program in Santa Barbara! We have a strong Yale contingent here at the meeting, including Maureen and Neala, along with Prof. Kanani Lee and her students Sarah Arveson and Jie Deng. We are all having a great time thinking and learning about geophysical and geochemical heterogeneity in the mantle.

6/30/18 - We just wrapped up an excellent MAGIC project meeting in Arlington, VA, hosted by the Virginia Tech research campus there. We are putting the finishing touches on several MAGIC-related papers this summer; stay tuned for updates!

6/26/18 - The Hartford Courant did a really nice story on the New England Seismic anomaly and ongoing seismic data collection efforts in New England today.

6/5/18 - Welcome to Dr. Miriam Reiss, who has arrived at Yale to start a six-month postdoc funded by the German research exchange. Miriam will be working on the seismic structure of the lower mantle beneath Africa using SKS and SKKS phases recorded at temporary deployments. Welcome, Miriam!

3/30/18 - We’ve just finished up a great visit with Ph.D. student Michael Grund from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Michael spent one week visiting our group and exchanging ideas about seismic anisotropy and deformation in the upper and lowermost mantle. Thanks for a terrific visit, Michael!

3/21/18 - Maureen has just gotten back from a spring break field trip with a group of students from the Fall 2017 G&G100 (Natural Disasters) to the Azores, where we explored volcanic features on four different islands. It was an amazing trip - pictures coming soon!

1/24/18 - Farewell to Jonathan Wolf, who has spent four months at Yale as a visiting undergraduate researcher. Jonathan is heading back to Muenster to finish his undergrad work. While at Yale, Jonathan worked on lowermost mantle anisotropy beneath Iceland. He is getting ready to submit a paper on this work soon - watch this space for updates!

12/20/18 - Our group has just gotten back from a busy week at the AGU Fall Meeting in New Orleans, with posters and talks presented on the MAGIC experiment, D” anisotropy, SKS splitting tomography, finite-frequency wavefield simulations in anisotropic media, and Love-to-Rayleigh wave scattering beneath the eastern U.S. 

11/30/17 - Recent Yale College graduates publish their senior thesis research in seismology! Congratulations to Ivette Lopez (YC ‘16) and Juan Aragon (YC ‘17), who each had a paper come out recently based on their senior research. Ivette was a co-author on a study of seismic anisotropy beneath New England that we published with collaborators from Rutgers (Levin et al., Geology, 2017).  Juan was first author on  a paper describing his senior thesis research on SKS splitting beneath the central Appalachians (Aragon et al., G^3, 2017).

11/30/17 - Beneath New England’s rocky exterior, there’s hot and dynamic mantle. Check out news stories from Rutgers and Yale on our new paper, just published in Geology, on new constraints from seismic anisotropy on mantle upwelling beneath New England.

11/25/17 - Exciting news; we’ve just had a paper come out in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (Aragon et al., 2017) that represents the first publication of data from the MAGIC array. This is the first of many to come, so stay tuned!

11/8/17 - Congratulations to Helen Janiszewski, who successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis at Columbia University last week. Maureen was very fortunate to be a member of her thesis committee - thanks for a terrific defense talk, and congrats! 

10/4/17 - Our research group paid a visit to the University of Massachusetts yesterday for a mini-workshop on seismic imaging beneath the northeastern U.S. We were hosted by Prof. Haiying Gao and several of her colleagues at UMass; we were treated to excellent interactions with her and her students, as well as Prof. Vadim Levin at Rutgers and his students. We look forward to continued collaboration among our research groups.

9/20/17 - Welcome to Jonathan Wolf, a visiting undergraduate researcher from the University of Muenster, Germany. Jonathan will be here for four months, working on a project relating to seismic anisotropy in the lowermost mantle. 

9/11/17 - There was a great story in yesterday’s New Haven Register about the SEISConn experiment - check it out! Thanks to Ed Stannard for putting this story together - it was great having a chance to share our research with you.

8/15/17 - We had a big week for the SEISConn experiment last week; we installed the last two stations and made some repairs so now the full 15-station array is up and running. Thanks to 2017 FEST teacher participants Jonathan, Andy, Kristen, and Dorrie for your hard work in the field - it was a pleasure working with you!

8/1/17 - Congratulations to Yale College undergrad Katherine Lutz, who just wrapped up her summer research in our group through the Yale STARS program with an excellent presentation on her project at the STARS symposium. Katherine is planning to continue her research on lowermost mantle anisotropy beneath North America during the coming academic year, so stay tuned for updates!

7/21/17 - Thanks to Marlyse Duguid at Yale FES for the invitation to speak in the Yale-Myers Forest Summer Seminar series yesterday - Maureen had a great time talking about Connecticut geology, EarthScope, and the SEISConn experiment.

7/19/17 - Maureen had an awesome time giving a talk on the deep Earth at the Secret Science Club in Brooklyn, NY on Monday. What a terrific and enthusiastic audience - thanks for having me!

7/5/17 - We have a pair of papers on D” anisotropy that have recently been published. Jie Deng’s paper on anisotropy near the eastern edge of the Pacific LLSVP has just come out in GJI, and Neala’s paper on lowermost mantle deformation beneath Australia is in press at JGR.

7/3/17 - Maureen and Neala just got back from two amazing weeks in Japan with the G&G departmental field trip. Highlights included a visit to a pegmatite in the Ryoke Belt, seeing an exposure of the Median Tectonic Line, exploring the effects of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, experiencing the Naruto Whirlpools up close, and visiting Mt. Ibuki, known for orographic precipitation and spectacular views. We even felt an earthquake while we were there, a shallow magnitude 5.2 in Nagano Prefecture. Update: check out a gallery of photos!

6/14/17 - We just hosted Professor Yvette Kuiper from the Colorado School of Mines for a two-day visit at Yale to talk about Appalachian tectonics in New England and how to integrate EarthScope imaging results with models derived from geologic constraints. Thanks, Yvette, for a great visit!

6/10/17 - Maureen and Neala just attended the Gordon Research Conference on the Interior of the Earth, which is always an excellent meeting. We each had a chance to present recent results on lowermost mantle anisotropy at the conference.

5/25/17 - We’re just wrapping up a great visit with Angelo Pisconti, a Ph.D. student at the University of Muenster who has been collaborating with us on the observations and modeling of lowermost mantle anisotropy. Thanks for a great visit, Angelo! 

5/23/17 - Commencement time is here again! Congratulations to Juan Aragon, who received his bachelor’s degree from Yale College yesterday. Juan has been an essential part of our research group for the past four years, playing a crucial role in the field work and data collection for the MAGIC and SEISConn projects. A paper based on Juan’s senior thesis, which described SKS splitting across the MAGIC array, will be submitted for publication soon. Congratulations, Juan - we are proud of you and what you’ve accomplished!

5/22/17 - Maureen just got back from the EarthScope National Meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, where she got to hear about all kinds of fantastic EarthScope science and also see some cool features from the 1964 Alaska great earthquake on the field trip. 

5/4/17 - We just had an excellent visit with Tarje Nissen-Meyer of the University of Oxford, who was here at Yale for two days to talk about our ongoing collaboration on lowermost mantle anisotropy. Thanks, Tarje!

3/30/17 - Maureen recently participated in the NETectonics session at the GSA Northeast Section meeting as well as the EarthScope Synthesis Workshop on the Evolution of Southeastern Appalachian Lithosphere - both gatherings were great opportunities to talk with colleagues about results from MAGIC, EarthScope, and related projects.

3/17/17 - We had a terrific mini-meeting on seismic anisotropy at Yale yesterday with the Yale and Rutgers seismology groups. Thanks Vadim, Xiaoran, Yiran, and Peter for making the trip up - we look forward to continuing collaboration between our groups.

3/3/17 - Thanks to Meg Weingart at Cheshire High School for hosting Maureen for a series of class visits yesterday! It was a great time talking to earth science classes about Connecticut geology.

1/25/17 - Maureen and Puskar just got back from a terrific trip to the Math+X seismology and mathematics symposium at Rice University - thanks to our collaborator Maarten de Hoop for inviting us and hosting Puskar’s extended visit at Rice.

1/10/17 - Welcome to Andrea Tesoniero, who just arrived to start a postdoctoral position in our research group! Andrea is an expert on mantle tomography and computational approaches to seismology, and he will be working on problems related to anisotropy in the lowermost mantle. Welcome, Andrea! (And yes, this now means we have two guys named Andrea in the group…)

12/20/16 - As usual, our group had a busy week at the AGU Fall Meeting, featuring presentations by students Neta Bar, Jie Deng, Neala Creasy, and Juan Aragon, as well as Maureen. We were also happy to hang out with group alums Colton Lynner, Erin Wirth, Caroline Eakin, and Heather Ford at the meeting. If you’re interested, you can check out the AGU Honors Ceremony and Maureen’s talk in the New Generation of Scientists session on AGU On Demand - look under the “Union” session listings.

12/7/16 - Congratulations to Dr. Alexandra Goryaeva, who successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis at Universite de Lille earlier this week. Maureen was very fortunate to be a member of her thesis committee - thanks for a terrific defense talk, and congrats! 

11/30/16 - Maureen had a great trip out to USC earlier this week to give another EarthScope Speaker Series talk on the structure and dynamics of the eastern US - thanks for a great visit!

11/18/16 - Thanks to Tine Thomas at WWU Muenster and Tarje Nissen-Meyer at Oxford for hosting Maureen for terrific visits last week - looking forward to new and exciting collaborations with you both!

10/28/16 - Maureen is just back from a whirlwind two-week trip that included MAGIC field work as well as visits to McGill University, West Virginia University, and the Eastern Section SSA meeting to talk about results from the MAGIC project. The McGill and WVU trips were sponsored by the EarthScope National Office as part of the EarthScope Speaker Series.

10/25/16 - Hard to believe, but the MAGIC data set is officially in the books! We wrapped up our final field campaign for MAGIC a few days ago, demobilizing 28 broadband stations and packing up the equipment to go back to the PASSCAL instrument center. Thanks to our amazing field crew: Juan Aragon, Neala Creasy, Puskar Mondal, Andrea Servali, Bryce Crawford, Sarah Arveson, and John West. 

10/4/16 - Maureen just got back from an exciting and stimulating workshop on the Subduction Zone Observatory effort in Boise, ID. Group alums Erin Wirth and Colton Lynner were also at the workshop.

9/30/16 - Former postdoc Heather Ford has just had her paper on anisotropic layering and mid-lithospheric discontinuities in cratonic lithosphere published in JGR.

8/30/16 - Welcome to Puskar Mondal, who has just arrived at Yale to start his Ph.D. program in seismology. He is starting a project to develop new approaches to shear wave splitting tomography. He recently completed his undergraduate studies at IIT Kharagpur in India. Welcome, Puskar!

8/24/16 - We’ve just wrapped up two successful weeks of field work with the Field Experiences for Science Teachers (FEST) project! We had eight teacher participants this year, and we were able to service 5 SEISConn stations and install 6 new ones. Thanks Dorrie, Stephen, Brian, Katherine, Sean, Frank, Barbara, and Dustin for all your hard work!

7/22/16 - Maureen has just been announced as one of the recipients of the 2016 James B. Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union. I am honored by this recognition!

7/18/16 - Maureen just got back from two weeks at the 2016 CIDER Summer Program on Flow in the Deep Earth at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, UCSB. We had a strong Yale contingent there, including Prof. Kanani Lee, current graduate students Neala Creasy and Sarah Arveson, and recent grads Caroline Eakin and Tolu Olugboji. Check out the program (including slides and videos from the presentations) here. 

7/10/16 - Yale News just did a really cool profile of the SEISConn project - check it out! We are psyched to get the remaining 8 stations installed next month - check back here for updates.

6/3/16 - We are currently recruiting high school science teachers to participate in the Summer 2016 FEST (Field Experiences for Science Teachers) program, which will run during the first three weeks of August. More details can be found on the FEST web page.

6/1/16 - Welcome to Andrea Servali, who has just arrived at Yale to begin his graduate work.  Andrea will be working on the structure and dynamics of the eastern US, using data from the MAGIC experiment and other deployments. He comes to us from Rutgers University, where he completed his bachelor’s degree in geology. Welcome, Andrea!

5/31/16 - We’ve just returned from the field for the May 2016 service run for the MAGIC project. Teams from Yale and TCNJ visited all 28 stations to collect data and check on station health - you can see field pictures on our Twitter feed @MagicGeoArray.

5/23/16 - Hard to believe that Commencement is here again! Congratulations to Dr. Colton Lynner, who will be receiving his diploma at the ceremonies today - and welcome back to campus, Colton! Congratulations also to graduating seniors Ivette Lopez, Eric Fein, and XinXin Xu, who all worked on senior projects with Maureen.

5/5/16 - Maureen is very pleased to have been chosen as a speaker for the EarthScope Speaker Series for 2016-2017. Speakers are selected “based on their outstanding research accomplishments involving EarthScope as well as their abilities to engage a variety of audiences.” I’m looking forward to giving my talk, titled “The Appalachians and how they got that way: Structure and dynamics of eastern North America.”

4/20/16 - A double congratulations to Neala Creasy, who has recently been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and who just passed her Ph.D. qualifying exam! 

3/20/16 - Maureen just got back from a great field trip to the Big Island of Hawaii with the G&G100 Natural Disasters class. Not a bad way to spend spring break! We did some terrific hiking in Volcano National Park, went stargazing on Mauna Kea, and had a great visit to the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.

1/4/16 - Congratulations to undergrads Kenneth Jackson and John McNamara, who have just had their first scientific paper published in G-cubed.

12/21/15 - Fall AGU is usually a busy week for our research group, and this year was no exception! Highlights included presentations by undergraduates XinXin Xu, Juan Aragon, and Lauren Abrahams, postdoc Heather Ford, graduate student Neala Creasy, and former graduate students Erin Wirth and Colton Lynner. We presented new results on lowermost mantle anisotropy, the mid-lithospheric discontinuity, the MAGIC experiment, and the Field Experiences for Science Teachers project. 

11/30/15 - Another result from the PULSE project has just been published, with recent graduate Caroline Eakin’s paper on internal deformation of the subducting Nazca slab coming out in Nature Geoscience. You can also read news releases on this work.

11/10/15 - Maureen has just returned from the 2015 Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium in Irvine, CA, where she enjoyed an excellent meeting that covered a range of scientific disciplines.

9/21/15 - Congratulations to Colton Lynner, who has just successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis. Colton will spend some time this fall at Yale finishing things off, and then will move to Tucson to start a postdoc with Susan Beck at the University of Arizona. Congratulations to the new Dr. Lynner!

8/14/15 - New results from the PULSE project have just been published in Nature! Sanja Knezevic Antonijevic’s paper on surface wave tomography using PULSE data shows evidence for a slab tear in the northern portion of the PULSE study area, shedding light on the dynamics and temporal evolution of flat slabs and the role that the subducting Nazca Ridge plays in Peruvian flat slab dynamics. You can also read news releases on this work.

8/10/15 - Goodbye to IRIS summer intern Lauren Abrahams, who just finished up a summer working on receiver function analysis for stations located near the Grenville deformation front in the eastern US. Lauren also did field work with our group for the MAGIC and SEISConn experiments. Lauren will be presenting the results of her project at the AGU Fall Meeting. Thanks for a great summer, Lauren - we miss you already!

8/7/15 - We’ve just had a great week in the field for the Field Experiences for Science Teachers (FEST) project, which involves high school science teachers in seismology field work. We installed four seismic stations in northern Connecticut as part of the Seismic Experiment to Image Structure beneath Connecticut (SEISConn) deployment, which is a planned array of 15 stations. Teachers Meg Weingart (Cheshire High School) and Troy Schinkel (currently transitioning from a position at Southington High School to teaching full-time at the college level) joined us for a week of field work, and we had a blast. Thanks Meg and Troy for your hard work!

7/13/15 - Check out the August 2015 issue of Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, which contains two new papers from our group. One paper, by postdoc Heather Ford, is on evaluating geodynamical models for flow at the base of the mantle. The second paper, by graduate student Anwar Mohiuddin, is on observations of mid-mantle anisotropy and describes the results of his second discourse project.

7/6/15 - We’re just back from another trip to the MAGIC field area, where we installed another 4 seismic stations, relocated one, and fixed some failing GPS antennas. Thanks to Lauren, Helen, Shangxin, and Juan for your hard work!

6/1/15 - Welcome to summer intern Lauren Abrahams, who will be working with Maureen and postdoc Heather Ford to study the anisotropic structure of the lithosphere in the central and eastern US. Lauren is being hosted through the IRIS internship program, and she is writing a blog about her summer research experiences - check it out!

5/11/15 - We are ready for some springtime MAGIC - Maureen and G&G undergraduate student Juan Aragon will be in the field this week for a service run to collect data from the MAGIC stations. We are also looking forward to presenting some preliminary results from MAGIC at the EarthScope National Meeting in Stowe, VT next month! 

4/30/15 - Grad student Colton Lynner’s paper on mid-mantle anisotropy beneath Japan, Izu-Bonin, and South America has just been published in GJI.

4/13/15 - Yale seismologists go to sea! Maureen Long and Colton Lynner just got back from ten days on the R/V Endeavor, retrieving broadband ocean bottom seismometers from offshore North Carolina. This cruise was part of the data collection effort for the GeoPRISMS Eastern North American Margin (ENAM) Community Seismic Experiment (CSE). We had a blast on the cruise - thanks to the participating scientists, the crew of the Endeavor, and the amazing WHOI OBS techs for all their efforts. Check out photos from the cruise on the ENAM CSE blog.

4/10/15 - Postdoc Heather Ford’s paper on observations and modeling of lowermost mantle seismic anisotropy beneath the Afar region of Africa has just been published in EPSL.

3/12/15 - Thank you to the New Haven Mineral Club for hosting Maureen as a guest speaker on Connecticut earthquakes this past week.

3/2/15 - A huge thanks to earth science teacher Megan Weingart of Cheshire High School for the invitation for Maureen to come and speak to her classes about seismology and plate tectonics last week - I had a blast and thoroughly enjoyed my visit to CHS!

2/25/15 - Maureen had the pleasure of visiting WNPR’s Where We Live program as a guest last week, chatting with John Dankosky and Patrick Skahill about Connecticut earthquakes and geology. The interview aired this past Friday.

1/22/15 - Recent graduate Caroline Eakin’s paper on SKS splitting beneath the PULSE stations in southern Peru has just been published in EPSL.

1/19/15 - Last week was an exciting one for us Connecticut seismologists, as the Plainfield area experienced a small earthquake swarm. There’s been lots of news coverage of this event.

1/15/15 - Big news - the first batch of data from the EarthScope FlexArray MAGIC experiment is now archived at the DMC! The network code is 7A - further information is available via the DMC Metadata Aggregator. The dataset includes one unrestricted station (CABN, located in Riverton, WV) - data from this station is freely available for use by anyone at any time. The rest of the data will be released two years after the end of the experiment.

12/21/14 - We’ve just come back from a successful and busy AGU Fall Meeting, with presentations on seismic anisotropy in the transition zone and uppermost lower mantle, lowermost mantle deformation at the boundaries of LLSVPs, structure and dynamics of the Peruvian flat slab, and the anisotropy of the continental lithosphere beneath the central and eastern US. Congratulations to Yale undergrads Kenneth Jackson and John McNamara, who gave their first-ever presentations at a scientific meeting.

12/3/14 - A big congratulations to Caroline Eakin, who has just successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis on the dynamics of flat slab subduction beneath Peru. Caroline will be starting a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Oceanography Centre/University of Southampton next month. Congratulations, Dr. Eakin!

11/26/14 - Another MAGIC field update: we got another 4 stations installed just before the Thanksgiving holiday, for a total of 23 stations currently operating. Data from the first year of the experiment are currently being archived at the IRIS DMC - stay tuned for updates!

10/30/14 - Do you believe in MAGIC? A group of 12 seismologists from Yale, including a group of students from G&G456 (Introduction to Seismology), has just returned from our fall break trip to VA/WV/OH to install stations for the MAGIC broadband seismic experiment. We now have 19 instruments from the USArray Flexible Array pool up and running, with 9 more coming soon. Check out the latest field pictures on the MAGIC website, or follow us on Twitter at @MagicGeoArray.

10/17/14 - Former grad student Karen Paczkowski, now a science policy fellow at GSA, has just had two papers published describing her research on the numerical modeling of mantle flow beneath subducting slabs - one in GRL and one in G^3.

10/10/14 - Grad student Colton Lynner’s paper on testing models of sub-slab anisotropy using source-side shear wave splitting data has just been published in JGR.

9/16/14 - This is an exciting month for the GeoPRISMS Eastern North American Margin (ENAM) Community Seismic Experiment (CSE). Maureen is one of a group of scientists involved in planning and executing this project, which involves the collection of a suite of seismic data (both active and passive source, onshore and offshore) to study the structure of the ENAM passive margin. Two research cruises are currently ongoing, as well as the deployment and servicing of land seismic stations in North Carolina. More info about the project is available on the website. Good luck to all the ENAM scientists who are in the field this month - I’m looking forward to being part of the science party for the broadband recovery cruise this spring!

8/29/14 - Congratulations to Erin Wirth, who has just successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis! Erin’s thesis is titled “Interrogating Seismic Anisotropy in Subduction Zones and Continental Interiors.” She will be starting a postdoctoral research position at the University of Washington next month. Congratulations to the new Dr. Wirth!

8/25/14 - New graduate student Neala Creasy has just arrived to start her Ph.D. program - welcome Neala!

8/22/14 - We’ve just returned from the PASSCAL Instrument Center for instrument training in advance of the big MAGIC install trip - Maureen, grad student Colton Lynner, and undergrad G&G major Juan Aragon spent two days in Socorro, NM last week. Thanks to Pnina, Noel, and Katyliz out at PASSCAL for an excellent training course.

8/18/14 - Current graduate student (and soon-to-be-alum) Erin Wirth’s paper on the anisotropic structure of the mid-lithospheric discontinuity beneath the central US has just been published on the Geology website.

8/1/14 - Maureen and collaborator Maggie Benoit just returned from a week in the field for the MAGIC experiment. We visited all 17 currently operating MAGIC stations, and found sites for another ~7 in preparation for the upcoming main installation phase. You can find updates on the MAGIC web page, including field photos from the experiment Twitter feed. (If you want to follow us on Twitter, you can find us at @MagicGeoArray!)

6/14/14 - Graduate student Colton Lynner’s paper documenting sub-slab shear wave splitting beneath circum-Pacific subduction zones has just been published in G^3.

6/2/14 - Yale undergraduate Tierney Larson, G&G undergrad and crack field seismologist, has just started a summer internship at the University of North Carolina through the IRIS summer internship program. You can follow Tierney’s blog about her summer research.

5/27/14 - Graduate student Colton Lynner’s paper on lowermost mantle anisotropy at the boundary of the large low shear velocity province (LLSVP) beneath Africa has just been published in Geophysical Research Letters.

5/23/14 - Graduate student Caroline Eakin’s paper on local S splitting beneath Peru has just been published in Geophysical Research Letters. This paper represents the first publication of data from the recently completed PULSE experiment, which is aimed at understanding flat slab subduction beneath Peru. Several more papers based on the initial analysis of PULSE data are being prepared for publication, so watch this space for updates!

1/13/14 - Graduate student Erin Wirth has been awarded an Outstanding Student Paper Award (OSPA) from the Tectonophysics section for her presentation at the Fall AGU meeting. These awards recognize the top ~3-5% of student presenters at the conference. Congratulations, Erin!

12/18/13 - We’ve just returned from the 2013 AGU Fall Meeting, where we had a successful week of presentations. These included talks on sub-slab anisotropy and mantle dynamics (grad student Colton Lynner), lowermost mantle anisotropy beneath Africa (postdoc Heather Ford), and mantle wedge anisotropy and serpentinization (Maureen), along with posters on the mid-lithospheric discontinuity beneath the central US (grad student Erin Wirth), shear wave splitting beneath Peru (grad student Caroline Eakin), geodynamical modeling of rollback subduction (former grad student Karen Paczkowski) and anisotropy beneath central Europe (undergrad student Leah Campbell). 

11/1/13 - The MAGIC experiment is officially collecting data! A team of Yale seismologists spent a week in the field at the end of October installing 17 (!!!) broadband stations in Virginia and West Virginia. Check out the MAGIC web page for updates (including some fun field pictures from the official MAGIC twitter feed). Thanks to postdoc Heather Ford, grad students Erin Wirth, Colton Lynner, Caroline Eakin, and Tolu Olugboji, and undergrads Tierney Larson, Juan Aragon, and Luke Cartwright for being part of the awesome Yale field team and for their hard work.

10/10/13 - We’ve just wrapped up a very successful workshop for the PULSE project, held in Tucson, AZ - seismologists from Yale, UNC, University of Arizona, and the Instituto Geofisico del Peru spent several days discussing preliminary results from PULSE and the related CAUGHT experiment. We’re currently starting to write up results for publication, so watch this space for updates!

9/12/13 - Graduate student Caroline Eakin’s paper on frequency-dependent shear wave splitting and complex anisotropy beneath the Peruvian flat slab has just been published in JGR.

8/27/13 - MAGIC field work is officially underway! Teams from TCNJ and Yale spent time in VA and WV in July and August identifying sites and installing vaults for seismic stations. We now have 17 vaults installed in VA/WV, with several additional sites identified. We hope to begin installing seismometers in October 2013 - stay tuned!

7/22/13 - Maureen has just returned from two awesome weeks at the Cooperative Institute for Dynamic Earth Research (CIDER) summer program in Berkeley, CA.

6/30/13 - Field work for the PULSE project in Peru has ended! Seismologists from Yale (including Maureen Long, Caroline Eakin, and Leah Campbell), the University of Arizona, and the University of North Carolina have just returned from a successful field campaign to demobilize the PULSE array.

5/31/13 - Maureen has just returned from several days in Socorro, NM, participating in the IRIS Internship Program orientation week. This year’s crop of IRIS interns will be publishing blogs on their summer projects - check them out.

5/15/13 - We’ve just received word that the Mid-Atlantic Geophysical Integrative Collaboration (MAGIC) experiment has been funded by the NSF EarthScope program! This project will involve a deployment of 28 broadband seismometers across Virginia, West Virginia, and Ohio to study the mantle dynamics, lithospheric structure, and topographic evolution of the southeastern US passive continental margin. The project will involve a collaboration with Maggie Benoit (TCNJ), Scott King (Virginia Tech), and Eric Kirby (Oregon State). We anticipate that field work for this project will get underway this summer; stay tuned for updates!

5/10/13 - A paper describing the research of former summer intern Kimmy McCormack has just been published in GRL. Erin Wirth, who co-supervised Kimmy’s research, is also an author on the paper. We wish Kimmy luck as she heads off to UT Austin for grad school in the fall! UPDATE: There’s a featured item on the IRIS internship web page about this publication - check it out!

3/30/13 - Welcome to Dr. Heather Ford, who has just joined our research group as a postdoc. Heather is coming from Brown University, where she worked with Karen Fischer on the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary. While at Yale, Heather will be working on lowermost mantle anisotropy and deformation. We’re excited to have her join the Yale seismology group!

1/20/13 - Graduate student Colton Lynner’s paper on seismic anisotropy and mantle flow beneath the Caribbean and Scotia slabs has just been published in EPSL.

12/10/12 - Members of our research group have just returned from a successful AGU Fall Meeting, with presentations on PULSE project results, mantle wedge anisotropy and hydration beneath Japan, sub-slab anisotropy and mantle flow beneath northwestern Pacific subduction zones, and lowermost mantle dynamics at the edge of the African LLSVP.

10/30/12 - The last service run for the PULSE project has been completed, with graduate student Caroline Eakin returning from a very successful trip to Peru. The PULSE array will remain deployed until early summer 2013. An abstract has been submitted to the AGU Fall Meeting describing preliminary analyses of PULSE data. 

8/22/12 - Graduate student Erin Wirth’s paper on the structure of the mantle wedge beneath Japan from receiver function analysis has just been published in G-cubed.

8/15/12 - We’ve recently published a paper on SKS splitting in the southeastern US in collaboration with Lara Wagner and Maggie Benoit. This represents the first publication of data collected using the Yale broadband seismometers; 8 of these instruments were deployed in 2009-2010 in Virginia and West Virginia as part of the TEENA experiment. The paper also includes measurements made by former undergraduate intern Emme Johnston as part of her senior thesis at Mount Holyoke College, which was co-advised by Maureen.

6/11/12 - Undergraduate student and G&G major Leah Campbell has just started her IRIS summer internship working at the USGS in Menlo Park. You can follow her blog describing her experiences.

6/8/12 - Maureen is co-editing a special issue of Earth and Planetary Science Letters on scientific results from USArray - see the announcement on the EarthScope webpage. If you do USArray-related research, please consider contributing to the special issue - for questions or more info, contact Maureen. 

6/7/12 - Graduate student Colton Lynner’s paper on the contribution to SK(K)S splitting from anisotropy in the lower mantle beneath Africa has just been published in BSSA.

5/23/12 - Caroline Eakin and Yale G&G undergraduate student Jenn Kasbohm are currently in Peru carrying out a service run of the PULSE array. This service run represents the midpoint of the PULSE experiment, so after this we’ll have at least one year of data available for all PULSE stations. Stay tuned for updates as scientific results from PULSE start to roll in.

5/15/12 - Yale senior physics major Daniel Petkevich has recently completed a senior project looking at mantle anisotropy beneath the Hindu Kush-Pamir seismic zone. Congratulations to Daniel on his graduation!

4/17/12 - Colton Lynner and Caroline Eakin have both passed their Ph.D. qualifying exams - congratulations Colton and Caroline!

4/9/12 - Karen Paczkowski has successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis. As part of her thesis research, Karen has been working with Maureen and collaborator Laurent Montesi to model the dynamics of the sub-slab mantle and understand how slab geometry, subslab decoupling, and ambient mantle flow interact to control the sub-slab mantle flow field. She is currently preparing two publications describing this work, so stay tuned for updates - and congratulations to the new Dr. Paczkowski!

3/13/12 - Recent grad Jenny Hanna’s paper describing her research on shear wave splitting and upper mantle anisotropy beneath the Alaska subduction zone has just been published in Tectonophysics. 

3/9/12 - We’ve recently been funded through an NSF CAREER grant to carry out an investigation of the geodynamics of subducting slabs in the deep mantle using seismic anisotropy. This award will allow our group to explore anisotropy and mantle flow in D”, in the transition zone, and in the deep upper mantle beneath slabs. We will also be establishing a pilot program to involve secondary school science teachers in field seismology research. This project will officially get underway in April 2012 - stay tuned for updates!

12/14/11 - Postdoctoral researcher Xiaobo He’s paper on lowermost mantle anisotropy beneath the northwestern Pacific has been published in G-cubed.

12/5/11 - Our research group turned out in force at the 2011 AGU Fall Meeting, with presentations given by Maureen, postdoc Xiaobo He, graduate students Colton Lynner and Caroline Eakin, and former summer intern Kimmy McCormack, along with co-author Erin Wirth. 

11/20/11 - A paper describing the research of former summer undergraduate research assistant Emme Johnston has just been published in Tectonophysics. Emme worked to evaluate the potential for subduction intiatiation at oceanic fracture zones.

10/19/11 - Maureen Long and Jenny Hanna have just returned from Peru, having accomplished a very successful service run of PULSE stations. Stay tuned for updates and early results from the PULSE project.

6/30/11 - We are thrilled that all 40 broadband seismic stations of the PULSE (PerU Lithosphere and Slab Experiment) project are up and running! A group of Yale seismologists (Maureen Long, Caroline Eakin, Colton Lynner, Erin Wirth, and Jenny Hanna) spent several weeks in Peru in May/June installing and servicing stations.

6/6/11 - Summer research intern Kimmy McCormack has arrived. Kimmy is a student at the University of South Carolina who will spend ten weeks at Yale this summer, hosted through the IRIS summer internship program. Kimmy will work closely with Erin Wirth on a project involving anisotropic receiver function analysis at stations located in the Ryukyu arc to understand mantle flow and the distribution of water within the mantle wedge.

5/3/11 - Jenny Hanna has successfully defended her M.S. thesis - congratulations Jenny!

4/5/11 - Erin Wirth has received news that she has been named an NSF Graduate Research Fellow - congratulations Erin!

2/14/11 - Maureen has been named a 2011 Sloan Research Fellow - one of four from Yale.

1/21/11 - Graduate student Brad Foley’s paper on seismic anisotropy and mantle flow beneath the Tonga slab has just been published in GRL.