Dr. John Stamatakos of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI)

The widely felt vibrations from the recent M 4.8 earthquake in New Jersey has many people wondering: where do earthquakes occur and what do we need to understand about future earthquakes and their potential impacts? In this talk, we aim to address these questions. We will describe where past earthquakes have occurred in the United States and their association with faults and other tectonic features.  You will learn about current approaches to earthquake forecasting and seismic hazard analysis, how seismic shaking varies across the country, and ways that earthquakes cause damage through ground shaking, ground failure, aftershocks, and even tsunamis.  We will review the recent M 4.8 - 2024 Tewksbury, New Jersey Earthquake and what we can learn from this east coast seismic event. Finally, we will share select examples from a post-earthquake reconnaissance trip to Turkey following the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes.

Biography:

Dr. John Stamatakos is an Institute Scientist at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio Texas.  He was trained as a geologist and geophysicist and has many years of international research experience in seismology, seismic engineering, seismic risk assessment, structural geology, tectonics, and exploration geophysics. He has applied his expertise and experience to investigations of earthquake sources in numerous probabilistic seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) studies in the United States, Spain, and Africa.  Over the past 29 years he has worked on commercial nuclear energy projects including nuclear power plants, nuclear fuel fabrication facilities, and used fuel storage facilities. He is currently a member of the Committee for Geological and Geotechnical Engineering at the National Academy of Sciences.   Before joining SwRI, he held positions of visiting faculty at the University of Michigan and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland.

Dr. Kristin Ulmer of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI)

Biography:

Dr. Kristin Ulmer is a Senior Research Engineer for the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) specializing in geotechnical engineering and geotechnical earthquake engineering. Since joining SwRI, she has participated in several research projects evaluating hazards from earthquakes and seismic-induced liquefaction.  Dr. Ulmer became a member of the global Next Generation Liquefaction (NGL) project in 2020. As part of NGL, she collaborates with teams of researchers to advance the state-of-the-art in liquefaction model development.  Following the devastating earthquakes in Türkiye in 2023, she joined a reconnaissance team through the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) association to document ground deformations and damage to foundations in the region with the goal of improving our understanding of liquefaction initiation and its effects.