My name is Luis Rivera, I am a professor of seismology at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Strasbourg; France (IPGS, Unversity of Strasbourg/CNRS). My main scientific interest is to better understand the source mechanics of large earthquakes. With this purpose, I spend most of my research time in modeling different kind of earthquake related data such us teleseismic, strong-motion, gravity, free oscillations, permanent deformation, historical records, etc. Some of the events I have studied are Sumatra (1907, 1935), Spitak (1988), Racha (1991), Erzincan (1992), Antofagasta (1995), Tauramena (1995), Hector Mine (1999), Kokoxilli (2001), Sumatra-Andaman (2004), Maule (2010), Tohoku-oki (2011) and the recent offshore Sumatra (2012). The stresses in the crust and their relation to focal mechanisms as well as the energy flux and energy balance associated with the earthquake phenomenon are some of the questions I have more specifically addressed in the past.

In the last years, I have been working with Professor Hiroo Kanamori and Dr. Zacharie Duputel (both at Caltech) in developing a source inversion algorithm to retrieve the overall source parameters of large earthquakes. It exploits the W-phase (a very long period early arriving seismological phase). The main assets of the algorithm are its rapidity and its robustness (it is in particular extremely insensitive to shallow structural lateral heterogeneities). The algorithm is now running on real time at the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) and at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) at global scale and in Mexico (UNAM) and Taiwan () at regional scale. During my 1-month stay at ERI, I plan to interact in particular with Pr. H. Tsuruoka to implement an online instance of the W-phase algorithm at regional scale around Japan.

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