Adjunct Professor Dr. Marco Pagani

Dr Marco Pagani obtained a M.S. in Geological Sciences and a PhD in Earth Sciences from the University of Milan (Università degli Studi di Milano), Italy.

Since the completion of his M.S. in 1997 and until 2004, he worked with the Geological Survey of the Emilia-Romagna Region, Italy and the Institute for the Research on Seismic Risk of the Italian National Research Council on Seismic Microzonation studies for various urban centres in Northern Italy. In this timeframe, he also participated in a seismic micronation project for three urban centres damaged by the 1997 Central Italy Earthquake Sequence and to the SESAME European Project on the use of ambient noise for site-response analysis.

From 2005 until 2008, as a temporary researcher at the Institute for the Dynamics of Environmental Processes of the Italian National Research Council, he performed research on unsupervised learning techniques and data analysis for the development of new friction materials.

From 2009 until mid-2010 he worked at the Swiss Seismological Service at ETH (Switzerland), where he led the seismic hazard team of the project that launched the Global Earthquake Model (GEM) initiative.

Since 2010, Dr Pagani is the coordinator of the Seismic Hazard Team at the Global Earthquake Model Foundation, Italy.

Summary of Qualifications

Dr Marco Pagani has more than twenty years of experience in Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis and Seismic Microzonation. Throughout his career, he participated in seismic hazard studies at a regional, national, urban scale and site-specific scale. At the end of 2018, Dr Pagani's team at the GEM Foundation released the first version of a global seismic hazard map which is part of the GEM Global Earthquake Model. The release of these maps was the culmination of various collaborations, coordinated by Dr Pagani, with several national agencies and, international projects and GEM internal hazard modelling projects.

Dr Pagani has extensive experience in developing scientific software. Since 2013, he leads the scientific development of the hazard component of the OpenQuake Engine, the open-source seismic hazard and risk calculation engine developed by the GEM Foundation.

Selected Publications

  • Pagani, M., Garcia-Pelaez, J., Gee, R., Johnson, K., Poggi, V., Silva, V., Simionato, M., Styron, R., Vigano`, D., Danciu, L., Monelli, D., and G. Weatherill (2020). The 2018 version of the Global Earthquake Model: Hazard component. Accepted for publication on Earthquake Spectra.
  • Pagani, M., Johnson, K. and, J. Garcia-Pelaez (2020). Modelling subduction sources for probabilistic seismic hazard analysis. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 501, https://doi.org/10.1144/SP501-2019-120
  • Kotha, S.R., Bazzurro, P. and M. Pagani (2018). Effects of Epistemic Uncertainty in Seismic Hazard Estimates on Building Portfolio Losses. Earthquake Spectra, 34(1): 217-236, https://doi.org/10.1193/020515EQS020M
  • Pagani, M., Monelli, D., Weatherill, G., Danciu, L., Crowley, H., Silva, V., Henshaw, P., Butler, L., Nastasi, M., Panzeri, L., et al. (2014). OpenQuake Engine: An Open Hazard (and Risk) Software for the Global Earthquake Model. Seismological Research Letters, 85: 692–702, https://doi.org/10.1785/0220130087
  • Chen, Y., Weatherill, G., Pagani, M., and F. Cotton (2018). A transparent and data-driven global tectonic regionalization model for seismic hazard assessment. Geophysical Journal International, 213(2): 1263–1280, https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggy005