Barbara Romanowicz


Barbara A. Romanowicz is a French geophysicist and an expert on imaging the earth's interior.

Early life

Romanowicz was born in Suresnes, France.
Barbara Romanowicz is the daughter of :pl:Kazimierz Romanowicz|Kazimierz Romanowicz and Zofia Romanowiczowa. The first years of Barbara's life were an inspiration for Zofia Romanowiczowa's debut novel entitled Baśka and Barbara.

Education

Romanowicz received a BSc degree in mathematics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, a MSc in applied physics from Harvard University and PhDs in astronomy from Pierre and Marie Curie University and in geophysics from Paris Diderot University.

Career

From 1979 to 1981, Romanowicz was a postdoctoral research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1982 to 1990, while working as a researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, she developed a global network of seismic stations known as :fr:Geoscope|GEOSCOPE to study earthquakes and the interior structure of the earth. From 1990 to 2011, she was director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory; she was also a professor in the Earth and Planetary Science department at the University of California, Berkeley. During her time at the Berkeley laboratory, she helped develop a real-time earthquake notification system for northern California. In 2011 she was named to the chair of Physics of the Earth Interior at the Collège de France, where she regularly organises symposiums on topics related to the evolution of the Earth.
She has been European editor for Geophysical Research Letters and editor for Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors.
She is the founding mother of Cooperative Institute for Dynamic Earth Research.

Honors and Awards

In 1979, Romanowicz married Mark Jonikas.