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Biographical Sketch
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Tom Jordan is the Director of the Southern California Earthquake Center and the W. M. Keck Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California, where is SCEC headquartered.
He is responsible for all aspects of SCEC’s program, which currently involves over 600 scientists at more than 60 universities and research institutions. He is a member of the California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council and the Governing Council of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author or co-author of approximately 170 scientific publications, including the NAS decadal report, Living on an Active Earth: Perspectives on Earthquake Science, and a popular textbook, Understanding Earth (5th edition).
He received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1972 and taught at Princeton University and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography before joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the Robert R. Shrock Professor in 1984. He served as the head of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences for the decade 1988-1998. In 2000, he moved from MIT to USC. He has been awarded the Macelwane and Lehmann Medals of the American Geophysical Union and the Woollard Award of the Geological Society of America. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
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Education
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 B.A. , California Institute of Technology, 6/1969
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M.S. , California Institute of Technology, 6/1970
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Ph.D. , California Institute of Technology, 8/1972
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Academic Appointment, Affiliation, and Employment History
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University Professor, University of Southern California, 01/01/2004-
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Director, Southern California Earthquake Center, 02/01/2002-
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W.M. Keck Foundation Professor of Geological Sciences, University of Southern California, 09/01/2000-
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Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1984-2000
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Head, Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1988-1998
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Professor, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, 1982-1984
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Associate Professor, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, 1977-1982
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Assistant Professor, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, 1975-1977
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Assistant Professor, Princeton University, 1972-1975
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Description of Research
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Summary Statement of Research Interests
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Thomas Jordan came to USC College to run the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), a leading consortium of earthquake research made up of move than 50 universities and other institutions. He also came to USC to teach. Jordan is a geophysicist, applied mathematician and member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Jordan studies earthquakes, seismological study of earth structure and geodetic observations of plate motions and interplate deformation. Other areas of interests include continental formation and tectonic evolution, mantle dynamics, and statistical descriptions of seafloor morphology. Through his research, Professor Jordan has made a series of major discoveries about the three-dimensional structure of the Earth's interior. He used the waves from earthquakes to look deep inside the earth in an effort to understand the machinery that drives plate tectonics. The surface motions of the plates are a manifestation of the convection in the Earth's solid mantle, and he and his group have been able to show that this convection goes very deep.
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Research Specialties
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Seismology, earthquake dynamics, seismic hazard analysis, plate tectonics, mantle dynamics
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Affiliations with Research Centers, Labs, and Other Institutions
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Southern California Earthquake Center,http://www.scec.org/
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Publications
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Book
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Jordan, T. H., Grotzinger, J.
(2007).
The Essential Earth.
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Grotzinger, J., Jordan, T. H., Press, F., Siever, R.
(2005).
Understanding Earth.
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Conference Proceeding
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Deelman, E., Callaghan, S., Field, E., Francoeur, H., Graves, R., Gupta, N., Gupta, V., Jordan, T. H., Kesselman, C., Maechling, P., Mehringer, J., Mehta, G., Okaya, D., Vahi, K., Zhao, L.
(2006).
Managing Large-Scale Workflow Execution from Resource Provisioning to Provenance tracking: The Cyber-Shake Example. Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE Internatinal Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing.
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Journal Article
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Zechar, J., Jordan, T. H.
(2008).
Testing alarm-based earthquake predictions. Geophysical Journal International.
Vol. 172 (2), pp. 715-724.
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Plesch, A., Shaw, J. H., Benson, C., Bryant, W. A., Carena, S., Cooke, M., Dolan, J., Fuis, G., Gath, E., Grant, L., Hauksson, E., Jordan, T. H., Kamerling, M., Lindvall, S., Magistrale, H., Nicholson, C., Niemi, N., Oskin, M., Perry, S., Planansky, G., Rockwell, T., Shearer, P., Sorlien, C., Suss, M. P., Suppe, J., Treiman, J., Yeats, R.
(2007).
Community Fault Model (CFM) for Southern California. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.
Vol. 97, pp. 1793-1802.
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Chourasia, A., Cutchin, S., Cui, Y., Moore, R., Olsen, K., Day, S., Minster, J. B., Maechling, P., Jordan, T. H.
(2007).
Visual Insights into High-Resolution Earthquake Simulations. Computer Graphics and Applications, IEEE.
Vol. 27 (5), pp. 28-34.
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Chen, P., Zhao, L., Jordan, T. H.
(2007).
Full 3D Tomography for the Crustal Structure of the Los Angeles Region. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.
Vol. 97, pp. 1094-1120.
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Becker, T. W., Browaeys, J. T., Jordan, T. H.
(2007).
Stochastic analysis of shear-wave splitting length scales. Earth and Planetary Science letters/Elsevier.
Vol. 259 (3-4), pp. 526-540.
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Chen, P., Jordan, T. H., Zhao, L.
(2007).
Full three-dimensional tomography: a comparison between the scattering-integral and adjoint-wavefield methods. Geophysical Journal International.
Vol. 170, pp. 175-181.
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Jordan, T. H.
(2007).
SCEC's program of earthquake system science in Southern California. Bulletin of the Earthquake Research Institute, Tokyo University.
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Zhang, C., Callaghan, S., Jordan, T. H., Kalia, R. K., Nakano, A., Vashista, P.
(2007).
ParaViz: A spatially decomposed parallel visualization algorithm using hierarchical ordering. International Journal of Computational Science.
Vol. 1, pp. 407-421.
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Zhao, L., P. Chen, T. H., Jordan, T. H. Strain Green's Tensors, Reciprocity, and Their Applications to Seismic Source and Structure Studies. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America Vol. 96. 5 October 2006: 1753-1763
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Zhao, L., Jordan, T. H.
(2006).
Structural sensitivities of finite-frequency seismic waves: a full-wave approach. Geophysical Journal International.
Vol. 165 (3), pp. 981-990.
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Olsen, K. B., Day, S., Minster, J. B., Cui, Y., Chourasia, A., Faerman, M., Moore, R., Maechling, P., Jordan, T. H.
(2006).
Strong Shaking in Los Angeles expected from southern San Andreas Earthquake. Geophysical Research Letters.
Vol. 33
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Jordan, T. H.
(2006).
Earthquake predictability, brick by brick. Seismological Research Letters.
Vol. 77 (1), pp. 3-6.
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Jordan, T. H.
(2006).
Earthquake system science in Southern California. Bulletin of the Earthquake Research Institute, Tokyo University.
Vol. 81, pp. 211-219.
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Zhao, L., Jordan, T. H., Olsen, K. B., Chen, P.
(2005).
Frechet kernels for imaging regional earth structure based on three-dimensional reference models. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.
Vol. 95 (6), pp. 2066-2080.
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Field, E. H., Gupta, V., Gupta, N., Maechling, P., Jordan, T. H.
(2005).
Hazard map calculations using grid computing. Seismological Research Letters.
Vol. 76 (5), pp. 565-573.
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Maechling, P., Gupta, V., Gupta, N., Field, E. H., Okaya, D., Jordan, T. H.
(2005).
Grid computing in the SCEC community modeling environment. Seismological Research Letters.
Vol. 76 (5), pp. 581-587.
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Chen, P., Jordan, T. H., Zhao, L.
(2005).
Finite-moment tensor of the 3 September 2002 Yorba Linda earthquake. Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.
Vol. 95 (3), pp. 1170-1180.
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Field, E. H., Seligson, H. A., Gupta, N., Gupta, V., Jordan, T. H., Campbell, K. W.
(2005).
Loss estimates for a Puente Hills blind-thrust earthquake in Los Angeles, California. Earthquake Spectra.
Vol. 21 (2), pp. 329-338.
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McGuire, J. J., Boettcher, M. S., Jordan, T. H.
(2005).
Foreshock sequences and short-term earthquake predictability on East Pacific Rise transform faults. Nature.
Vol. 434 (7032), pp. 457-461.
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Field, E. H., Gupta, N., Gupta, V., Blanpied, M., Maechling, P., Jordan, T. H.
(2005).
Hazard calculations for the WGCEP-2002 earthquake forecast using OpenSHA and distributed object technologies. Seismological Research Letters.
Vol. 76 (2), pp. 161-167.
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Maechling, P., Gupta, V., Gupta, N., Field, E. H., Okaya, D., Jordan, T. H.
(2005).
Seismic hazard analysis using distributed computing in the SCEC Community Modeling Environment. Seismological Research Letters.
Vol. 76 (2), pp. 177-181.
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Honors and Awards
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Recipient of National or International Prize in Discipline, Inge Lehman Medal of the American Geophysical Union, 2005-
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USC University Professor, 2004-
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American Philosphical Society, Member, 2002-
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National Academy Member, Member, 1998-
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Recipient of National or International Prize in Discipline, George P. Woollard Award of the Geological Society of America, 1998-
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American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Member, 1995-
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Recipient of National or International Prize in Discipline, James B. Macelwane Award of the American Geophysical Union, 1983-
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Endowed Chair, W. M. Keck Foundation Chair in Geological Sciences, 2000-
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Fellow (or Equivalent) of National Society in Discipline, American Geophysical Union, 1983
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Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, 1980-1982
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