Personal information
Biography
Max Wyss grew up in Zuerich, Switzerland, where he earned a Diploma in geophysics at the Federal Institute of Technology. He obtained his MS and PhD in seismology at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena in 1970. Currently he is a senior researcher at the non-profit foundation International Centre for Earth Simulation, Geneva, Switzerland.
After working as research scientist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California and at the Lamont-Doherty Observatory, Palisades, New York, he joined the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. There he worked from 1973 through 1991, advancing from Assistant to Full Professor. In 1991, he joined the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks occupying the endowed chair of the Wadati Professor of Seismology. From 1993 to 1995, he was State Seismologist of Alaska. From 2001 to 2014 Wyss served as the Director of the World Agency of Planetary Monitoring and Earthquake Risk Reduction in Geneva. In 2015 he joined the International Center for Earth Simulation in Geneva as scientific expert. He is Professor Emeritus of the University of Alaska.
Max Wyss’ 233 scientific publications deal with: Seismic hazard and risk, earthquake losses, population exposed, composition of the built environment, earthquake source parameters, crustal deformation, stress/strain tensors, seismicity patterns, earthquake prediction, seismotectonics, historic seismicity, seismicity related to volcanoes and number of fatalities in earthquakes.
The awards he received included the Humboldt Senior Scientist award and a number of awards for specific research papers and proposals. For 15 years, he served as editor of Pure and Applied Geophysics. He chaired the IASPEI Sub-commission on Earthquake Prediction during the years 1987-2002. Wyss also served on review panels of the EU, NASA, the National Science Foundation (USA), the US Geological Survey, and the German Geotechnologien Program.
Wyss, worked in the following countries and institutions as visiting scientist, including the University of Tokyo, the National University of Mexico, Tohoku University, the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, the National Research Institute for Earthquake Prediction in Tsukuba, the Geoforschungszentrum in Potsdam, the University of Kiel, the University of Karlsruhe, the Seismological Observatory in Erlangen, and he collaborated with scientists in 28 countries.
Discoveries of Wyss together with colleagues included: earthquakes are multiple events, fault creep, the dependence of mean magnitude on stress, apparent stress, relation of magnitude to rupture area, mapping magma chambers and asperities by b-values, errors in some earthquake prediction schemes, method of estimating earthquake fatalities in real time, the earthquake closet, errors in seismic hazard estimates, ratio of rural to urban quake losses, potency of earthquakes by country, and the earthquake load by country.
Internationally, Wyss has evaluated the seismology program of India and the performance of five national research laboratories in Greece. His consulting activity include seismic hazard analyses for dam sites in South America, Central America and Asia. Wyss served on numerous external review panels of scientific projects, including the annual review panel of GEOFON at GFZ.
Wyss founded the GPS consortium of American Universities, UNAVCO and he led the team that assemble the tool to estimate earthquake losses from 2005 to 2014. The data set for population and the built environment in QLARM includes nearly 2 million settlements including all countries of the world. Since 2003 Wyss has distributed 1,315 near-real-time alerts for earthquakes worldwide, estimating the number of fatalities within less than an hour. max@maxwyss.ch