Dr Chris Rollins

Born in Menlo Park, California, Chris Rollins got an incredibly lucky start in geoscience by landing a high school internship with Dr Ross Stein at USGS Menlo Park, modelling earthquake interactions offshore northern California. He attended the University of Southern California and stumbled into another lucky opportunity in the form of the Southern California Earthquake Center, then moved up the freeway to Caltech to do a Ph.D. on tectonic strain accumulation, statistical seismology and crustal deformation in Southern California and Nepal. After postdoctoral research in Alaska, Michigan, and the UK, he moved to Wellington, New Zealand in 2021 to work at GNS Science. At GNS (now Earth Sciences New Zealand), Chris works on a variety of projects, including improving New Zealand's earthquake catalogue and constructing seismicity rate models for the National Seismic Hazard Model; using geodetic data to constrain tectonic deformation in NZ and across the Alpine-Himalayan Belt; and studying a legendary earthquake that raised the site of present-day Wellington airport out of the water sometime around the year 1460, known from Māori retellings.

 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5291-6956