Ahmed Elbanna
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL·Earth & Environmental Science
Earthquakes cannot be predicted precisely, but physics-based computer models can estimate where future ruptures are likely and how strongly the ground will shake. Those estimates feed into building codes, land-use plans, and the design of power, water, transport and communication systems.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
Computer Science
- Topics
earthquake physics
seismic hazard
rupture forecast
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Build an extensible software framework and science gateway that gives a broad user community access to physics-based earthquake rupture forecast models without requiring local expertise or computing resources.
- Enable simulations of the coupled evolution of earthquakes and faults, producing seismicity, ground motion, fault network configuration, strain rates and topography as outputs for hazard analysis.
- Couple simulations with data assimilation pipelines and machine-learning pattern recognition so that models can be informed and validated against large observational datasets on demand.
- Curate and seed community tools and data products describing fault and rock properties as standardized simulation inputs, and support user contribution, sharing and reproducibility of workflows.
More about the research
The models are hard to use, though: they demand specialized expertise and large amounts of computing power, and their results need checking against real observations.
Why it matters
Improved physics-based rupture forecasts could sharpen seismic hazard estimates, which underpin building codes, land-use decisions, and the design of transportation, communication, power and water systems. By removing barriers of expertise and compute access, the gateway could let a much wider group of researchers and students produce and validate the forecasts that communities use to reduce earthquake risk.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ahmed Elbanna
University of Southern California, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Rebuild the Unified Community Velocity Model as UCVM-Next, replacing legacy file formats with Zarr and TileDB array storage so that three-dimensional seismic velocity models carry versioning, provenance and validation information.
Yihe Huang
University of Michigan, MI·Earth & Environmental Science
Produce earthquake catalogs with consistent magnitudes for small and large quakes in southern California and Oklahoma by recalculating magnitudes from relative magnitude differences.
Gregory McLaskey
Cornell University, NY·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether seismic wave properties change reliably before or after laboratory earthquakes on dry and fluid-saturated meter-scale faults, using active source seismic interrogation with strain, slip and seismic sensor arrays.
The school
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: 41 labs on PI Pages, $907M a year on research, 870 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.