Geology professor receives NSF CAREER grant

Patricia Gregg will use award to study volcano eruptions

Patricia Gregg has received a National Science Foundation CAREER grant to study volcano forecasting. (Photo by L. Brian Stauffer.)
Patricia Gregg has received a National Science Foundation CAREER grant to study volcano forecasting. (Photo by L. Brian Stauffer.)
Geology

professor Patricia Gregg has been awarded a highly competitive National Science Foundation grant for faculty early in their careers. The award affords her five fully-funded years of research, which she will use to develop volcano eruption forecasting.

Gregg received the NSF CAREER Grant titled "CAREER: Investigating the unrest and eruption potential of caldera-forming volcanoes in the Aleutians.” The grant is part of NSF's Early Career Development Program for professors with potential to become leaders in research and education. Gregg has been a faculty member at Illinois for five years.

Her project, which will be supported at about $100,000 a year by the grant, aims to apply a volcano eruption forecasting method her research group has developed to volcanoes in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

“I don’t take for granted that these are very, very hard awards to get,” Gregg said. “I am both excited for what it means professionally but also for what it means for the science, because I do think that we’re on the edge of a breakthrough in how we monitor volcanoes.”

The typical time length of an NSF grant gives about two to three years of funding. The extended CAREER grant, however, “gives scientists a much longer time period to spin up new and transformative research. It provides a really unique opportunity because you can sink your teeth in to a project that might otherwise be intangible in a shorter time frame,” Gregg said.

In five years, Gregg hopes that the work she and her students are doing will expand across the globe and that other monitoring agencies can start testing their volcano forecasting approach, which uses methods developed in climate and weather forecasting. It could also possibly help alert people earlier of eruptions, like those affected now in Hawaii by the Kilauea volcano.

“I believe that Dr. Gregg’s research on NCSA supercomputers may add a new tool of global importance for more accurately predicting and monitoring volcanic activity,” said Seid Koric, technical assistant director of National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois and research professor of engineering, who has worked with Gregg.

Gregg came to the university after working as a postdoctoral researcher at Oregon State University and said it was a natural fit. She also didn’t let the location of central Illinois deter her from her volcanology work, as, she said, Champaign sits at the perfect location for travel, whether it be to Asia or Europe.

“The computing resources just can’t be beat anywhere else in the world,” she said. “And for what I want to do in my research, it’s a location where the sky’s the limit. There’s a support structure to help me approach basically anything my imagination can come up with, and that’s very rare and really exciting.”

It was shortly after arriving on campus that she teamed up with researchers at the NCSA to develop a high performance computing volcano forecasting method.

“We are combining geophysical monitoring data from volcanoes with sophisticated multiphysics models to investigate volcano evolution and provide forecasts for those volcanoes,” Gregg said.

This past year, she was also named an NCSA faculty fellow. It allowed her to expand her research and helped develop a high performance computing version of her previous work, which the team is now running on NCSA supercomputers.

Gregg’s ability to use NCSA resources has been a tremendous opportunity, she said.

“We’re really excited to apply our methods at Aleutian volcanoes because of the challenges they pose,” she said. “These volcanoes are sort of off the beaten path.”

Although the volcanoes of the Aleutian Arc are remote, about 50,000 jet passengers pass over that region of Alaska each day. If a volcano erupts without anyone knowing, a pilot may fly over and atmospheric matter from the eruption could harm jet engines. The work Gregg is doing should help alert people of eruptions earlier.

“It’s an interesting area to work in, because we want to be able to monitor these volcanoes to the fullest extent, which is not always the easiest thing to do,” Gregg said.

News Source

Jessica Bursztynsky

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