The war which is coming
Is not the first one. 

There were other wars before it.
When the last one came to an end
There were conquerors and conquered.

Among the conquered the common people
Starved. Among the conquerors
The common people starved too.

Bertolt Brecht

My research interest is focused on the study of the temporal and spatial evolution of seismicity in a high seismic risk zone, in order to characterize the complex system which generates the earthquakes – the Earth’s crust – and better investigate possible precursors of the black swan phenomenon: a great earthquake.

The main field of my research is the study of the seismic source.

The characterization of the seismic source is a fundamental step in the description of the mechanisms of generation and propagation of an earthquake. Understanding the relationship between the energy budget and the size of a seismic rupture allows to tackle the upscaling problem from microseismicity to large events.

I developed a methodology to estimate earthquake source parameters from a fully probabilistic inversion of single-station displacement spectra. The method is based on a Markov chain global optimization technique, and on the conjunction of states of information probabilistic framework (Tarantola, 2005). The final output is the joint a-posteriori probability density function in a low-dimensional representation of the parameter space. This object allows to obtain a robust information about the expected values of the source parameters, with a robust estimation of uncertainties accounting for between-parameter correlations and frequency bandwidth limitation.

[ On the top, the view from the ISS taken by the cosmonaut Серге́й Ряза́нский ]