Oliver S Boyd, Ph.D.

I began with the National Seismic Hazards Modeling Project in Golden, CO in 2004 studying time-dependent seismic hazard in Alaska and producing a seismic hazard analysis of Afghanistan, the latter being done in conjunction with other U.S. Agency for International Development’s reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. I moved to Memphis, TN in 2007 to focus on earthquake hazards in the central and eastern United States (CEUS) and returned to Golden in 2013 to work on issues related to earthquake hazards across the conterminous United States, specifically those related to earthquake ground motions as part of the Ground Motion Project. Much of my past research has centered on several aspects of earthquake hazards including time-dependent earthquake probabilities, declustering of foreshocks and aftershocks, and parameters related to earthquake sources. I helped update the CEUS source models for the 2008 and 2014 updates of the National Seismic Hazard Model (NSHM) and helped to incorporate basin models in the western United States for the 2018 update of the NSHM. More recently, I have been working on ground motion site amplification along the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains and building a geology-based National Crustal Model for earthquake hazard studies. Prior to joining the Survey, I obtained my Ph.D. in Geophysics from the University of Colorado at Boulder where I performed laboratory experiments of seismic wave attenuation in artificial glass cracks and glass bead cylinders, produced and interpreted tomographic models of seismic wave attenuation and velocity beneath the western United States, and studied receiver functions in New Zealand.