Suzan van der Lee, Ph.D.

Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor
Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences
Northwestern University

Role: Suzan van der Lee supervises the NU seismology graduate students, guiding their seismology research, and works with Professor Emeritus Emile Okal on interpreting the vectorized legacy seismograms produced by the University of California, Davis. van der Lee will work with co-PI Hwang and other experts on identifying and interpreting seismic records most suitable for analysis in the context of the scientific targets of the project. Van der Lee will provide advice on the seismology digitization efforts at UC Davis and of the BP/SD software development team. She also leads the Education and Training Group.

Bio: Suzan van der Lee is a data-driven seismologist and a professor in Earth and planetary sciences. She aims to understand how the dynamics of planetary interiors are connected to planetary surface processes, and how the Earth’s present interior structure both records the past and predicts the Earth’s future on geological time scales. Her inferential data science methods include tomographic imaging of the Earth’s mantle and crust as well as detection and characterization of shrouded seismic events in continuous data. She has led numerous big-data analyses and seismic data acquisition field experiments in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. She is a Ph.D. in Geological and Geophysical Sciences from Princeton University and completed postdoctoral training at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington DC, in 1998. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.