about me

I grew up in the southeast of England, obsessing about indie music, and broadly interested in science. I studied Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, specialising in Geology, graduating in 1999. I added a Masters in Geophysics from Durham University in 2000, for which I spent four glorious months working at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, studying earthquakes in volcanoes, falling in love with the West Coast, and generally not getting rained on. I then moved to the University of Oxford for my doctorate (a "DPhil", not a PhD), using satellite radar to study earthquakes in Asia, and completed that in 2005.

Since there are large earthquakes in California, and not in the UK (and a lot of rain in the UK, and not much in California), I moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2005, working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory. And since 2007 I have been on the faculty of the University of California, Riverside, as part of the Earthquake Processes group in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.