Prof. Dr. Domenico Giardini

Domenico Giardini is Full Professor of Seismology and Geodynamics at the ETH Zürich, Switzerland, since 1997.

Prof. Giardini was born on March 19, 1958 in Bologna, Italy. He studied Physics and completed his doctorate in 1987 at the University of Bologna. He worked as postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University (1982-1986), researcher at the National Institute of Geophysics in Rome (1987-1992) and Associate Professor of Seismology at the University of Rome III (1992-1997).

He was the Director of the Swiss Seismological Service until 2011 and President of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in 2011-2012.

He directed the Swiss Competence Center for Environment and Sustainability (CCES) and now leads the Swiss Competence Center for Energy Research – Supply of Electricity (SCCER-SoE).

He directs the Seismic Risk Sector of the Italian High Risk Commission and is a member of the Nuclear Earthquake Safety Commission of Switzerland.

He was President of the European Seismological Commission (ESC), Chair of the International Federation of Seismic Networks (FDSN) and is now President of the International Association of Seismology & Physics of the Earth Interior (IASPEI).

He coordinated international projects for the European Commission (including NERIES, SHARE, NERA, STREST), UNESCO, the UN, NASA, ESA and the OECD.

He is a Co-PI of the 2015 ESA Pathfinder mission, to test technologies for the detection of gravitational waves, and of the 2016 NASA InSight mission, to install a seismometer on Mars.

He directed the Global Seismic Hazard Assessment Program of the UN/International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) and was a co-founder of the Global Earthquake Model initiative.

He co-authored over 220 publications in international peer-reviewed journals, with a focus on deep earthquakes, Earth free oscillations, structure of the Earth’s mantle and core, source inversion, waveform modeling in complex media, seismic hazard and risk assessment, microzonation, planetary seismology, induced seismicity, geoenergies. In the past 15 years, 60 PhD Theses were completed under his Professorship at ETH Zurich.

He was Visiting Professor at Caltech and is now Nanyang Visiting Professor at NTU, Singapore.