Sin-Mei Wu

PhD, Geophysics

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

NEWS! I will be starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in fall 2024. Please reach out to me (smwu@hawaii.edu) for collaborations or student opportunities!

Graduate student opportunity!

4D seismic exploration for volcanoes and renewable energies.

Graduate student opportunity from Fall 2024 to conduct passive seismic imaging and monitoring to characterize spatiotemporal processes of subsurface structure in volcanic and geothermal regions. This opportunity is ideal for students eager to gain expertise in seismic wavefield theory, big data analysis, rock physics, and field campaigns. The primary research focus is the Big Island of Hawai'i, with potential research areas including Yellowstone and Iceland.

My main research interest is exploring nature using seismic interferometry and array data. I am fascinated by how much further details we can learn about geysers and volcanoes from the advanced data collection and the methodology development, including (but not limited to) ambient noise imaging, seismic source location (polarization + back projection), and coda wave interferometry. Beyond the static characteristics of the systems, I dedicate to the spatiotemporal patterns (4D) to understand the evolution, or the dynamics of the natural systems.

In addition, beyond the shallow Earth, I am also interested in understanding the formation and the evolution of Earth's Inner Core, such as what are the spatial patterns of the core nowadays and how/why the core evolved to the current status. I study these questions primarily via core phases of seismic signals and I look forward to learning more after combining the knowledge beyond Seismology.

Research Interests

Dynamics of hydrothermal and volcanic systems (via 4D imaging, static formation, and prediction)
Interferometric methodology development (seismic and acoustic)
High-resolution seismic imaging (top 5 km)
Magma storage and melt fraction estimation
Geothermal resource and CO2 sequestration
Seismic location & back projection (earthquake, volcanic/non-volcanic tremor, microseism, tropical cyclone, etc)
Seismic monitoring (groundwater, magmatic activity, anthropogenic activity, earthquake, tides, etc)
Planetary interior (Earth and Mars)

Awards

Outstanding reviewer for JGR: Solid Earth 2022
University of Utah The Stokes-Eardley Fellowship – Grant $10,000 Fall 2020
University of Utah Department of Geology and Geophysics Outstanding PhD Student award 2019–2020
University of Utah Graduate Research Fellowship – Grant $18,700 2019–2020
The David S. and Inga M. Chapman Fund scholarship – Grant $1,042 2019
Cooperative Institute for Dynamic Earth Research (CIDER) summer program 2019
Seismological Society of America Annual Meeting Travel Grant 2018
IRIS US Array Data Processing and Analysis Short Course – recipient 2016
IRIS Workshop: Emerging Fields and Technologies in Seismology – scholarship recipient. 2016

Research Projects

The first section summarizes the studies on naturally eruptive systems (geysers and volcanoes) using our own nodal data, with a particular interest in 4D properties that help to understand the dynamics of the systems. The areas of interested are confined within the top 100 m–1 km of Earth's crust.

The second section exploits seismic arrays with hundreds of elements to image the crustal structure of geothermal and magmatic environments in greater detail. Three-component data further provide special lens into the texture/fabric of the systems.

The third section focuses on deeper, larger scale structure of Earth's inner core. We focus on the heterogeneity on the scale length of ~10 km which constitutes thousands of kilometer's structure beneath the inner core boundary. Such structure bears information about Earth's evolution.

Check out the research page and my Google Scholar for more details!