Piero Poli

SM Seismology

The 2019 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Piero Poli for innovative research in seismic interferometry and earthquake seismology.

Piero Poli’s research career started off with an innovative PhD. thesis on measuring body waves through seismic ambient noise analysis. His early articles on this topic gained a lot of attention, placing him immediately at the center of a lively and productive debate. As post-doctoral fellow at MIT and later at Grenoble, Poli was brave enough to move on from his initial research subject, focusing his efforts on earthquake seismology. He quickly acquired entirely new competences which resulted in an impressive string of publications on issues as diverse as earthquake initiation, seismic precursors, and the general problem of constraining the parameters that define the seismic source, by means of both kinematic and dynamic inversions. Most recently he became involved in the growing field of earthquake forecasting via machine learning. Throughout his career, Poli showed a remarkable talent for not only coming up with good answers to existing problems, but also identifying new, important questions to investigate. In this endeavour, he formed a broad network of collaborators, co-authoring his publications with a number of world-class experts in the themes he has been exploring.
In summary, Piero Poli is an outstanding scientist not only in terms of his impressive productivity, but also because of his unique way of doing things, never content of adding only footnotes to earlier research, but always on the look for new topics and innovations. By awarding him as an outstanding early career scientist, we are rewarding not only drive, commitment, professionalism, but also creativity, originality and independence.