Prof. Rob van der Hilst, Head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at MIT, announced today that Prof. William Frank will join EAPS in July, 2020 as an Assistant Professor. Prof. Frank was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in ERL/EAPS from 2015-2017 before becoming an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. He will join EAPS alongside Dr. Camilla Catania, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford who will also become an Assistant Professor at MIT in July, 2020.

From Prof. van der Hilst's announcement:

"William Frank is an undergraduate from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, received a MSc and PhD from the Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris, France, was a NSF Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. Germán Prieto at MIT, and since 2018 has been assistant professor at USC.  William’s research concerns the physical mechanisms that control deformation within the Earth’s crust.  Understanding the continuum of rupture modes and fault instability within the Earth, from shallow stick-slip earthquakes to deep slow transients, to still deeper steady creep, is key to improved estimates of earthquake hazard.  His multidisciplinary approach combines seismological techniques with geodetic observations to yield knowledge about the evolution of faulting processes in time and space and how the solid Earth responds to tectonic, volcanic, and anthropogenic forcings ... William is very interested in machine learning and I expect that he will want to take an active role and make the best of the enhanced opportunities the College of Computing is expected to offer."

Image: William Frank presents at the 2016 ERL Annual Founding Members Meeting.