My earthquake research focuses on stress transfer, earthquake triggering, and thrust earthquake mechanisms. I work closely with Ross Stein (U.S. Geological Survey), Geoff King (Institut de Physique du Globe, Paris), and Andrew Freed (Purdue U.). I think our work is highly cited for a couple of reasons: (1) We worked on the 1992 magnitude 7.3 Landers earthquake, which turned out to have an exciting clear relationship with its many aftershocks, as well as with the 1999 magnitude 7.1 Hector Mine quake. Thus we got to work with the exciting events. (2) Our 1994 paper in Bull. Seismol. Soc. Amer. described in detail the basics of Coulomb stress calculations, which are useful for researchers. (3) With rapid advances in computing power and publicly available software, researchers can now perform Coulomb stress calculations with relative ease. Our group started early in a rapidly growing research field.

I think the most useful contribution of our work is to demonstrate to the research community, through relatively simple examples, that there might indeed be some underlying relationship between stress changes caused by a major earthquake and where aftershocks are likely to occur.

I am a bit surprised that my work on earthquake research in the last decade is among the highly cited because earthquakes are only one of several aspects of my research. I am equally interested in geological processes under the oceans. Much of my published work is in marine geophysics and geodynamic modeling, especially on the subjects of mid-ocean ridges (the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Southwest Indian Ridge), oceanic hotspots (Galapagos, Iceland, Bouvet, and Azores), ridge-hotspot interactions, and lithosphere deformation.