The Great Quake Debate: an interview with seismologist and author Susan Hough

By Alka Tripathy-Lang

August 27, 2020

Growing up a self-proclaimed “geeky kid” whose hobbies were reading, writing and arithmetic, Susan Hough always had a penchant for the “writing” part, penning poems, stories or even comic strips in her spare time. She spent her childhood shuttling around North America because of her academic father, but landed in earthquake country for her undergraduate degree at the University of California Berkeley. Originally planning to major in math, astronomy or computer science, she ended up taking geophysics courses. She found the mathematically focused discipline appealing for its real-world relevance, and went on to obtain her Ph.D. from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. After a four-year stint at Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory in New York, she returned to California as a seismologist for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), where she continues to research myriad topics in earthquake science for her day job, while writing books and doting on her grandsons in her spare time.

Check out the rest of our conversation at Temblor.