Andreas Fichtner received the 2011 Keiiti Aki Young Scientist Award at the 2011 AGU Fall Meeting, held 5–9 December in San Francisco, Calif. The award recognizes the scientific accomplishments of a young scientist who makes outstanding contributions to the advancement of seismology.
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Andreas Fichtner is the deserving winner of the 2011 Keiiti Aki Young Scientist Award. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Mining and Technology, in Freiberg, Germany, and then was a Fulbright student at the University of Washington, Seattle, for 1 year, before going to graduate school at Ludwig Maximilian University, in Munich, Germany, where he received his Ph.D. in 2010. During his studies he also spent time at Laboratoire de Géophysique Interne et Tectonophysique (LGIT) in Grenoble, Institut de Physique du Globe (IPG) in Paris, and Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. Currently, Andreas is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences at Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands.
Andreas has worked on a range of topics, including adjoint inversion techniques, the implementation of numerical methods for seismic wave propagation, volcano seismology, and full waveform tomography applied on local to continental scales. He has already a substantial body of work, including a book on seismic modeling and inversion published by Springer last year. Andreas is on track to have a brilliant career.
—Peter Shearer, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La JollaResponse
I am deeply honored to receive this award named after Aki, whose pioneering work helped to initiate the field of seismic tomography that is now one of our primary sources of information on the interior of the Earth.
This award is a result of the amazing progress made in computational seismology in the course of the past 2 decades, and therefore I would like it to be understood as a community achievement. I am very grateful to my colleagues, who were always willing to share their knowledge and experience with me. In particular, I would like to thank my teachers Bernhard Forkmann, Wolfgang Sproessig, and Ken Creager, not only for patience with their querulous student but also for infecting me with their passion for science. Heiner Igel, Peter Bunge, and Brian Kennett opened to me all the opportunities a Ph.D. student can possibly think of and gave me the freedom to develop my own ideas. Also, I wish to thank Jeannot Trampert for his support and our many discussions, which I enjoy very much.
It is a true pleasure to be part of the computational seismology community!
—Andreas Fichtner, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands