EAPS wishes a warm, socially-distanced greeting to our newest Assistant Professors, Camilla Cattania and William Frank, who started on July 1.
Camilla Cattania is a seismologist with experience in numerical modeling, earthquake physics, and statistical seismology. She has developed new models of aftershock triggering based on static stress changes and studied swarms drive by magmatic intrusions and dynamic triggering. A separate but complementary aspect of her research consists of analytical and numerical modeling of slip on a single fault. Cattania has applied ideas from fracture mechanics to investigate the interaction between seismic and aseismic slip on isolated asperities, a topic she is now exploring in a wider range of tectonic settings and including additional physical processes. Her research concerns tectonic earthquakes but is also pertinent to so-called micro-seismicity induced by human action, such as hydrocarbon extraction, waste water injection, sub-surface geological carbon sequestration, and geothermal energy production.
William Frank’s research illuminates the physical mechanisms that control deformation within the Earth’s crust. Understanding the continuum of rupture modes and fault instability within the Earth, from shallow stick-slip earthquakes to deep slow transients, to still deeper steady creep, is key to improved estimates of earthquake hazard. His multidisciplinary approach combines seismological techniques with geodetic observations to yield knowledge about the evolution of faulting processes in time and space and how the solid Earth responds to tectonic, volcanic, and anthropogenic forcings.
