Caltech Expert to Head Geological Survey Office

Lucy Jones comes from a thoroughly seismological family.

Not only has she been an earthquake expert for nearly 20 years, but her husband, Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson, is a highly respected one as well. Even her young children have been by her side during some noted public earthquake briefings.

On the morning of the Landers earthquake of June 28, 1992, the largest temblor to strike the Southland in 40 years, Jones--lacking baby-sitting alternatives--kept her 21-month-old son, Niels, on her hip as she gave a televised news conference on the quake.

Her dedication will be challenged anew beginning Thursday when Jones, 43, takes over as scientist in charge of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Pasadena field office, with supervisory responsibilities over 25 scientific personnel.

Jones said Monday that she hopes her new administrative duties will not take too much time away from her research. And, ever proper, she made a point of promising to recuse herself from evaluating her husband’s earthquake research grant solicitations.

Jones’ research on earthquake foreshocks has provided statistical proof that one of every 20 California earthquakes is followed shortly by a larger one.

But she is quick to emphasize that so far no telltale signs have been discovered by which scientists can immediately tell which quakes are foreshocks and which are not.

Her other major research interests are the physics of earthquakes, quake hazard assessments and quake-producing geologic structures in Southern California.

Jones is replacing Jim Mori, who has resigned to become an earthquake professor at Japan’s Kyoto University.

The director of the Caltech Seismological Laboratory, Hiroo Kanamori, is the most prominent Southern California earthquake expert in the worldwide community of quake scientists.

But Jones and Caltech seismologist Kate Hutton are probably best known to the public in the Los Angeles area because they have provided most of the public explanations when earthquakes occur.

The new scientist in charge, who is also a research associate at Caltech, was born in Santa Monica.She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University. As a graduate student at MIT, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 1979 to work at the State Seismology Bureau in Beijing. She earned her doctorate in geophysics from MIT in 1981.

She then became a postdoctoral fellow at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory at Columbia University from 1981 to 1983.

She has been with the Geological Survey in Pasadena since 1983.