I'm a theoretician at heart.
I work in the application of
seismology usually to the earth.
I look at problems of how you extract information from complex datasets.
In seismology we create a lot of complex datasets,
usually by measuring the vibrations of the earth from
earthquakes and other natural sources or artificial sources
and the game I'm using playing is how you can
use that information to tell you something about
the earth itself or the nature of the source, i.e. an earthquake.
The most difficult problems in my field are thought to be
unsolvable. How do we really take these complex datasets and use
everything in the dataset to describe the earth or constrain the earth?
We use the information to understand
physical processes in the earth i.e. the motion of the plates
and the structure. My personal little buzz
is about really finding a
beautiful new method to do something with data that you couldn't do before,
ask questions you couldn't ask before. So I find
tools though analyzing data to be
exciting and powerful things
in some respects it's the opposite to what most scientists do they often have
a problem and look for a tool.
I also do that but I'm also excited by tools that then
need to find applications. Because I'm interested in
data science an inference, that brings me the contact with statisticians,
mathematicians,
physicists of course and increasingly, computer scientists and engineers.
My secret has always been to talk to people from a wide variety of backgrounds,
So we look at similar problems and they
bring fresh ideas and I think that's probably one of the
more distinguishing things about my career.