GJI Student Paper Award Winners 2024

Geophysical Journal International (GJI) is delighted to announce the two winners of the 2024 Student Paper Award. They are Théo Santos for his first author paper, “Refining Tomography with Generative Neural Networks trained from Geodynamics”, and Simone Puel for his first author paper, “An adjoint-based optimization method for jointly inverting heterogeneous material properties and fault slip from earthquake surface deformation data”.

The GJI Student Paper Award is presented annually for papers that, in the views of the GJI Editors, are the best submitted in a given twelve month period with a student as the corresponding and first author.

Théo’s paper, which can be found here https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggae240 , uses a Generative Adversarial neural Network (GAN) to generate models from a geologically plausible prior distribution obtained from geodynamic simulations.

Illustration of the convective construction of a marble cake shape, at various time steps. It is obtained by stirring a circular anomaly with chaotic convection. The simulated marble cake is the final image.

Credit

Théo Santos.

Théo said: "I feel very glad and honoured to receive this award. To celebrate, let's cook some marble cakes!"

Simone’s paper, which can be found here https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggad442, develops a novel technique based on an open-source finite-element computational framework to invert geodetic constraints directly for heterogeneous media properties.

Comparison of the recovered Poisson’s ratio, ν, structure between the (b) Tikhonov and (c) TV regularization.

Credit

Simone Puel

Simone said: “I am deeply honoured to receive this award and sincerely grateful to my co-authors and the GJI Editorial Board for their recognition. This work marks an important step in using open-source computational tools to connect geodynamic models with geodetic data, offering new insights into Earth's complex deformation processes. By integrating data from GNSS and InSAR, including future missions like NISAR, our approach aims to deepen our understanding of the interplay between Earth's structure and fault behaviour. I hope this research inspires further innovation in earthquake science and fosters collaboration across disciplines to address the challenges of a data-rich future.”

Margarita Segou, Editor in Chief of GJI, said: “In GJI we are proud to publish student papers of excellent quality, like these, that we believe will shape future research in solid earth geophysics.”

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