image: Weiqiang Zhu
Credit: Seismological Society of America
Weiqiang Zhu has been honored with the Seismological Society of America’s (SSA) 2025 Charles F. Richter Early Career Award for his contributions to AI-based approaches to earthquake monitoring, numerical modeling and inverse problems that have pushed the frontier of seismological research.
Zhu, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, will receive the Richter Award at the 2025 SSA Annual Meeting.
“Dr. Zhu's AI-centric approach to earthquake monitoring has been nothing short of groundbreaking,” said S. Mostafa Mousavi, a senior research scientist at Google and the 2021 Richter recipient, who nominated Zhu for the award. “His deep-learning models, such as PhaseNet, DeepDenoiser, and GaMMA, have been instrumental in redefining seismic phase picking, denoising, and phase association.”
Zhu’s innovative work in applying machine learning to a host of geophysical problems has contributed to breakthroughs such as the reveal of a mantle sill complex related to magma transport beneath Hawai’i with Zachary Ross' group at Caltech. The paper by Zhu and Gregory Beroza on PhaseNet, a convolutional neural network to measure P- and S-wave arrival times, is one of the most cited papers published in Geophysical Journal International since its release in 2018.
Zhu has expanded the capabilities of inverse problem-solving in seismology with several colleagues; and developed numerical simulations with Stanford University researcher Eric Dunham’s group to quantify a fault valving mechanism providing new insights into earthquake ruptures and sequences. More recently, Zhu has brought his innovative abilities to fiber optic seismology, developing PhaseNet-DAS, a neural network model designed for seismic phase picking using distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) data with Zhongwen Zhan’s group at Caltech.
In their commendations of Zhu, several colleagues noted Zhu’s creativity and his abilities to identify, develop and implement new algorithms that become useful within the seismological community. They also suggested that Zhu will lead efforts to bring together machine learning, cloud computing and seismic analysis in the near future.
Zhu received his B.S. (2013) and M.S. (2016) in geophysics from Peking University, and his Ph.D. in geophysics from Stanford University in 2021. He was awarded the Director’s Postdoctoral Fellowship from Caltech Seismological Laboratory in 2021.
The Charles F. Richter Early Career Award honors outstanding contributions to the goals of the SSA by a member early in their career. Nominees must have been awarded their most recent academic degree no more than six years prior to 18 April of the year that they are selected for the award. The award is supported in part by generous donations to the William B. Joyner Fund.