The UMD Department of Geological, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences cordially invites you to the

George and Rosalind Helz Distinguished Lecture in Geology

with

BARBARA ROMANOWICZ

Professor Emeritus of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California, Berkeley

on

"Developing and maintaining research workforce and infrastructure in physics of the Earth’s interior: lessons learned from CIDER and GEOSCOPE"

Thursday, October 8, 2026
Lecture at 5 p.m.
Reception at 6 p.m.

Edward St. John Learning and Teaching Center, Room 0202 (Map)

If you have a question about this event, including disability accommodations, please contact Vedran Lekic at ved@umd.edu.

About the Speaker

Barbara Romanowicz was born in France to Polish parents. Her mother was a writer, and her father held a Polish bookstore, “Libella,” on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris. She studied mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and completed a Ph.D. in geophysics at the Université Paris in 1979. After a two-year post-doc at MIT, she returned to Paris in 1981, where, for the next 10 years, she developed the global digital broadband seismic network GEOSCOPE, which remains operational today. In 1991, she moved to a faculty position in the Department of Earth Science at UC Berkeley, where, as director of UC Berkeley's Seismological Laboratory from 1991 to 2011, she developed real-time earthquake monitoring in northern California in collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey. She held the Physics of the Earth’s Interior Chair at the Collège de France in Paris from 2011 to 2020 and has been a professor of geophysics in the Graduate School at UC Berkeley since 2016. She was a founding member of the Cooperative Institute for Dynamic Earth (CIDER) and lead organizer of its summer programs from 2004 to 2018. Her main research focus at present is imaging deep Earth structure and dynamics using seismological tools, and she has also worked on earthquake processes and scaling laws, real-time estimation of earthquake parameters, and the development of modern broadband seismic and geophysical observatories on land and in the oceans and planetary seismology. She is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Académie des Sciences in France, a foreign associate of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and most recently became a fellow of the Royal Society of London.

About the Lecture

George R. and Rosalind Helz established the George and Rosalind Helz Distinguished Lecture in Geology in 2014 to allow the UMD Department of Geological, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences to annually host a world leader in science for one or a series of lectures. While George Helz spent his career in UMD's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, he greatly enriched the geology program by collaborating with geologists on a variety of scientific projects and student advisement. Many of the Department of Geological, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences faculty have also had the pleasure of collaborating with Rosalind Helz, most notably in studies on rocks from Hawaii. Rosalind Helz spent most of her career at the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, Va.