Department Seminars

Life and Lithification: What Silicified Microfossils Can (and Can’t) Tell Us.

Dr. Ashley Manning Berg
Mesa College – Professor

Host: Dr. Rafael Almeida

January 28, 2026
1 pm – CSL 422

Sensing Tsunamis: Toward Real-Time Early Warning from Sparse Offshore Observations

Dr. Alice Gabriel
UC San Diego and Scripps Institute of Oceanography – Associate Professor

April 29, 2026
1pm – CSL 422 or via zoom

Alice Gabriel is an Associate Professor of Geophysics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, with a guest affiliation at LMU Munich, Germany. She received her Diplom (MSc) focusing on Theoretical Physics from TU Dresden in 2008, and her PhD from ETH Zurich in 2013. Her research focuses on computational seismology and earthquake physics, with an emphasis on physics-based modeling of earthquake rupture as well as seismic and tsunami wave propagation using high-performance computing, routinely utilizing the largest supercomputers worldwide. Her work integrates numerical methods, large-scale simulations, and data-science to address problems central to earthquake hazard assessment and risk reduction. Her research interests span earthquake physics, fracture mechanics, seismic wave propagation and modeling of earthquake cycles and tsunami generation and Gabriel directs several community software efforts. Her group aims at tackling some of the grand challenges of seismology: uncovering the physical mechanisms relevant to understanding earthquakes and tsunamis in the hope of increasing safety during and in the aftermath of these natural disasters. 

She has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications, including papers in Science, Nature and the SC Proceedings of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis. She has also (co-)mentored 32 graduate students (15 PhD and 17 MSc) and 16 postdoctoral researchers (current and former). She serves the scientific community through editorial and leadership roles, including as the current President of the Seismology Division of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). Her contributions have been recognized through multiple competitive honors, including AGU’s 2023 James B. Macelwane Medal which includes AGU Fellowship, the 2020 Seismological Society of America (SSA) Charles F. Richter Early Career Award, an 2019 ERC Starting Grant, and high-performance-computing-focused awards including the 2020 PRACE Ada Lovelace Award and the 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize. For more information visit her personal website at https://www.alicegabriel.com/