New Life From New Funding
NSF helps make USC epicenter of quake research
By Usha Sutliff, USC News
Long before the Southern California Earthquake Center’s funding was to run dry in January 2003, Tom Jordan decided he wouldn’t let the project die.
“We were faced with the prospect of this going away … and I thought that was completely implausible,” says Jordan, the center’s director and the W.M. Keck Foundation Professor of Earth Sciences in USC College. “We decided that there was such a need for continuing the work the center was doing that we put together a new proposal.”
The center now has a new wave of funding, more members and a renovated facility in North Science Hall.
The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) will get $3.6 million per year from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for the next five years. The center also has come out from under the wing of the NSF’s Science and Technology Centers Program, Jordan says.
Aside from the base grant, there will be $2 million per year from the NSF’s Information Technology Research Program and $325,000 per year for the development of a digital library that will be used to organize, classify and retrieve information about temblors.
While the center initially had nine core institutions—eight academic institutions and the Pasadena office of the USGS—that number expanded with the addition of Stanford University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and three more USGS offices. There are also 25 participating institutions that don’t contribute resources, but have scientists who are active in the research.
Joseph Aoun, dean of USC College, says SCEC is also attracting top academic talent. “This is the kind of leadership we expected to gain when we successfully recruited Tom Jordan from his senior position at MIT,” Aoun says. “He is galvanizing financial support for this very important center, and he is attracting excellent young faculty and graduate students to join him.
“This new round of funding and the newly renovated quarters in Science Hall are tangible signs that USC is now the principal center for earthquake research in the world,” he adds.
SCEC’s growth has not been quick or easy, says Jordan. “It has taken years to come together as an earthquake community,” he says. “We know how to do things together that we, as individual scientists, can’t do alone. It takes a village, so to speak, to make these things happen.”
Interest in the center has grown since it was started 11 years ago, because Southern California is a natural laboratory for studying earthquakes, he says. “Los Angeles really has one of the highest earthquake hazards of any major city in the world,” says Jordan. “Trying to get at what’s going on with earthquakes is very difficult. But here we have an opportunity to really get up close and personal with them.”
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