Southern California Earthquake Center

Southern California
Earthquake Center

Formation	1991
Headquarters	Los Angeles, California
Membership	16 Core Institutions and 47 Participating Institutions
Director and Board Chair	Thomas H. Jordan
Co-Director	Gregory C. Beroza
Website	www.scec.org

The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) is a consortium of fifteen research institutions with a mission to gather new information about earthquakes in Southern California, integrate such information into a comprehensive and predictive understanding of earthquake phenomena, and communicate this understanding to end-users in the earthquake engineering profession and the general public in order to increase earthquake awareness, reduce economic losses, and save lives. Its headquarters are at the University of Southern California.

A community of over 600 scientists from 16 Core Institutions, 47 Participating Institutions, and elsewhere participate in SCEC. SCEC also partners with a large number of other research and education/outreach organizations in many disciplines. Funding for SCEC activities is provided by the National Science Foundation and the United States Geological Survey. The current director of SCEC is Thomas H. Jordan.

To support this community, SCEC engages in information technology research that will revolutionize our methods of doing collaborative research and distributing research products on-line. In addition, the SCEC Communication, Education, and Outreach Program offers student research experiences, web-based education tools, classroom curricula, museum displays, public information brochures, online newsletters, and technical workshops and publications.

SCEC currently operates two different internship programs funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the United States Department of Defense as well as several other institutions including the University of Southern California and the United States Geological Survey. These two programs are the UseIT program which is directed towards developing software for understanding earthquakes worldwide and the SURE program which is aimed at more focused topics of research in the Earth Sciences. The director of these two programs is Dr. Robert de Groot.