William Ellsworth

My research interests can be broadly defined as the study of active faults, the earthquakes they generate and the physics of the earthquake source. A major objective of my work is to improve our knowledge of earthquake hazards through the application of physics-based understanding of the underlying processes. As Co-Director of the Stanford Center for Induced and Triggered Seismicity, my students, postdocs and I conduct multi-disciplinary studies into the causes and consequences of anthropogenic earthquakes in a wide variety of settings. I have also long been committed to earthquake risk reduction, specifically through the transfer of scientific understanding of the hazard to people, businesses, policymakers and government agencies. Before coming to Stanford in 2015, I was a research geophysicist at the U. S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California for more than 40 years where I focused on problems of seismicity, seismotectonics, probabilistic earthquake forecasting, and earthquake source processes