Research program
Seismology from crust to core, on and off Earth
Lekić’s group reads seismic waves to map what lies beneath the surface — from Earth’s inner core to the shallow subsurface, and from the Martian interior to the Moon and the icy worlds of the outer solar system — and builds the statistical machinery needed to know which of those structures the data truly require.
“…we have to put error bars on it.”
- Worlds studiedEarth · Mars · Moon · Europa
- Depth range15 cm → inner core
- ApproachWaveforms, Bayesian inversion, machine learning
Background
What is seismology?
Seismology is the study of earthquakes and the elastic waves that they excite in the Earth. Accordingly, seismology is often subdivided into source and structure studies. Source seismology seeks to understand earthquake slip and rupture, and in our lab we study source processes in stable continental interiors, icy shells, and the Moon and Mars. Structural seismology uses information carried by seismic waves about the temperature, pressure, density and composition in the deep interior of Earth and other planets. We focus on the analysis and modeling of individual wiggles that make up a seismogram and on quantifying the uncertainty of our inferences about interior structure and conditions.
Scale
Seven orders of magnitude in depth
Targets from the lab’s recent papers, plotted by depth below the surface (logarithmic axis).
Research themes
Eight lines of inquiry, one toolkit
The same questions recur at every scale: what structure do the waves require, how sure can we be, and what does it say about how a planet works. Each theme links to its papers.
Recent discoveries
What the waves revealed
Long-form accounts of recent papers from the group — the question, the trick that cracked it, and why it matters beyond the paper.
Most-cited papers, revisited
Five papers, two readings
Ranked by Google Scholar citations (October 2026). Each paper links to its DOI; the related papers show how later work bears on each question.
Tools & data we share
Models, datasets and code
Public Earth models, reference datasets and software from the group and its close collaborations — free to download and build on.
Next
Work on these problems with us
Prospective Ph.D. students and postdocs: see how to join the group — or browse the full publication record behind the themes above.