GEOL 3107
Geology Building
8000 Regents Drive
College Park, MD 20742

sburdick [at] umd [dot] edu

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My primary research interest is seismic tomography. The aim of tomography is to determine a model of Earth properties that best explain observed seismic data. In practice, the limitations placed on our observations and computational capabilities force us to make a number of decisions about the scales and parameterizations of models, the nature of the data considered, and the approximations to wave propagation that connect the two. My research focuses on a number of different approaches to this problem, from using millions of traveltimes to create a global mantle model to constraining lithospheric velocities using wave-equation imaging of discontinuities. For each approach I’m interested in better understanding how uncertainty in the data and physics leads to uncertainty in the model.