​NRF Investigatorship award to Assoc Prof Emma Hill for project using geodesy to understand natural hazards and sea-level change in Asia

We congratulate Assoc Prof Emma Hill, principal investigator of EOS and ASE, for her remarkable achievement of winning an NRF Investigatorship award. The NRF aims to develop strong science research by supporting top scientists in Singapore. Through the highly competitive Investigatorship award, the NFR “provides opportunities for established, innovative and active scientists and researchers, in their mid-career, to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk research”. The award is designed for a small number of excellent scientists, who have proven themselves as leaders in their respective fields of research.

Assoc Prof Hill and her group use geodesy to study natural hazards in Southeast Asia, in particular related to earthquakes and sea-level change. Geodesy is commonly defined as the study of the Earth’s shape, size, gravity field, and how these parameters change over time. The new project takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining geodetic data with earthquake physics modeling, structural geology as well as marine geophysics, all represented within EOS and ASE. The aim is to build a holistic understanding of natural hazards and sea-level change in Asia, for more accurate forecasting of great earthquakes, and to generate rapid satellite-based information on disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and tsunamis.

Available data on earth processes is rapidly increasing, provided through new imaging satellites with high temporal and spatial resolutions, as well as ground-based networks, including extensive, continuously operating GPS networks in Indonesia, Myanmar, India, Bangladesh, and Bhutan, that were installed by EOS and our regional collaborators. More data means vastly improved opportunities to understand these earth processes, but also the need for new methods to handle large sets of data. The current NRF Investigatorship award to Assoc Prof Hill involves developing new ways to handle these large data sets and combine them with models. By studying regional problems related to e.g. earthquake forecasting and creating better information on floods and tsunamis, Assoc Prof Hill intends both to address global scientific problems and save lives on the ground.

Read more about Emma Hill and the Geodesy Group here