Speaker: Fabrice Cotton

Prof. Dr. Fabrice Cotton

holds the chair of Engineering Seismology and Seismic Hazard at the University of Potsdam. He is the head of the seismic hazard and stress field section of the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) and he is chairing the GEM (Global Earthquake Model) Science Board.  Prof. Fabrice Cotton studied Earth Sciences in France at the “Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon” and at the University of Grenoble where he received a PhD in Geophysics in 1995. He joined IRSN (the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety) in 1996 and worked with seismic hazard assessment for French nuclear facilities as researcher and Director of the seismic hazard team from 1999 to 2001. Prof. Cotton was nominated Faculty Scholar at the Grenoble University in 2001 and junior fellow of “Institut Universitaire de France” in 2006. He was an invited visiting professor at the Kyoto University in 2013. His research has covered a wide variety of topics such as seismic hazard analysis, ground-motion evaluation and earthquake source studies. His main tools are the analysis of earthquake near-field data (accelerograms, GPS). He has co-authored 75 publications in peer reviewed journals (h-index 26, 1700 citations). He teaches geophysics and seismology (both theoretical and engineering) at the undergraduate and graduate level and has supervised 15 graduate students. He has been coordinating the international Master of Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology of the Grenoble University from 2005 to 2014. Prof. Cotton has been involved, as an external consultant, in a number of international projects involving seismic hazard assessments of critical facilities in France, Switzerland and South Africa.