Institute: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego
Title: Professor
Country/Region: USA
Period: 2026/9/2 – 2026/11/27
Theme: Probing Heterogeneous Fault-Zone Conditions along the Japan Subduction Zone Using Seismic Source Properties
Host: Aitaro KATO
Introduction: Wenyuan Fan is a Professor of Geophysics at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in geophysics from Peking University in 2008 and 2011, and completed his Ph.D. at Scripps Oceanography, UCSD in 2017. He was then a postdoctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution from 2017 to 2018 and joined the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science at Florida State University in January 2019, before returning to Scripps in 2020, where he now holds the rank of professor. He is an observational geophysicist whose research addresses the physics of seismic sources and their coupling to the broader Earth system. His current interests include earthquake nucleation, rupture, and triggering processes, seismotectonics at oceanic and continental transform faults, slow earthquakes, subglacial hydrology and basal slip beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet, submarine and subaerial landslides, and volcanic source processes. He develops array-based and machine-learning methods for seismic detection and imaging, and he integrates seismological observations with other geopysical observations and numerical models to study problems spanning the solid Earth, the cryosphere, and the oceans. He is a recipient of the AGU Keiiti Aki Young Scientist Award and an NSF CAREER Award.
Fiscal Year: 2026