Background and training
Although my current job title is assistant professor, I am essentially a geophysicist, teacher, programmer, cyclist, and football player. I am curiosity driven and strongly believe in fundamental, physics-based, and reproducable research. I am a member of the Applied Geophysics & Petrophysics section at Delft University of Technology. Focusing on the development of methodology, our research group conducts fundamental seismic, electromagnetical, and petrophysical research. Applications include imaging, characterization and monitoring for resource exploration (hydrocarbons, geothermal, etc.), as well as imaging of the Earth's deeper interior and atmosphere. My position is partly funded by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) and I work in close collaboration with their seismology and acoustics department.
My Ph.D. and postdoc research evolved around (but was not limited to) seismic interferometry: using cross-correlations and/or deconvolutions of existing signals to reconstruct new suburface or atmospheric responses. The existing signals can be either active, i.e., man-made sources, or passive, e.g., seismic energy due to oceanic waves coupling into the solid Earth or the atmosphere. The newly generated responses may serve as input to tomographic inverse problems or can be used to estimate structural changes of the medium. In particular, my research involved (i) the application of existing interferometric techniques to learn about the Earth's properties and (ii) the development of improved methodologies. Interferometric techniques can be applied on many scales (from imaging rift zones to the behavior of rocks in a labarotory) and to various media (solid Earth, oceans, and atmosphere). For the development of improved methodologies, I focused on a technique called interferometry by multidimensional deconvolution, which allows the reconstruction of more accurate responses. Both methodology development and applications have resulted in a variety of publications.
Supported by the European Union-funded initial training network (QUEST), I have obtained my Ph.D. at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. During that period, I have focused on the amplitudes of the reconstructed responses; especially on the potential of these responses to infer a medium's dissipative and/or scattering properties. For that purpose, I have been collaborating with Spectraseis (Brad Artman & Alexander Goertz), which is now part of ESG Solutions. the Institut des Sciences de la Terre de Paris (ISTep) (Lapo Boschi) and the Center for Wave Phenomena (CWP) at the Colorado School of Mines (Roel Snieder). After obtaining my PhD, and prior to my current position, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Delft University of Technology. During this period I continued working on interferometric imaging in close collaboration with Kees Wapenaar and other members of his group.
Next to science, I enjoy literature, hiking, backpacking and various sports, such as football, skiing and cycling.
© 2023 Kees Weemstra