Int'l Cooperation News----INSTITUTE OF GEOLOGY AND GEOPHYSICS, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

From June 6 to June 10, Professor Peng Zhigang of the Georgia Institute of Technology was invited by the Tectonophysics Discipline Group of the Tethys Research Center to visit the State Key Laboratory of Lithospheric Evolution at IGG of CAS. He conducted extensive discussions on earthquake template identification and its applications in the field of geoscience, in collaboration with multiple research groups at IGG, Peking University and multiple subordinate units of the China Seismological Bureau.

During the five-day academic exchange, Professor Peng Zhigang not only held English-language seismology lectures, he also shared his main research achievements and software in recent years. The event also launched an exchange program funded by IRIS (Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology). In addition two junior students from the United States will have a month-long visit at IGG.

Prof. Peng Zhigang was born in 1975, in Meishan City, Sichuan Province, China. Currently he is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Prof. Peng graduated from China University of Science and Technology in 1998 as a bachelor, and received a doctor's degree at the University of Southern California in 2004. His main research directions include high-definition fault structure inversion, Earth medium time change, characteristics of seismic sources, earthquake induction, slow earthquakes, deep Earth media, and other fundamental research. His research has received more than one million dollars in funding from the US over the past decade, including from the National Natural Science Foundation (NSF), United States Geological Survey (USGS), Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), and so on. At present, he has published more than 70 papers in international journals (Nature Geoscience, Science, GRL, JGR and BSSA), and has been invited to speak at many important international conferences and well-known colleges and universities. His research results have been reported by Xinhua News Agency and global mainstream media.