Keiichi Aki

Background

Aki was born in Yokohama, Japan.

Education

California Institute of Technology. University of Tokyo.

Career

He co-authored with Paul G. Richards, "Quantitative Seismology: theory and methods". He received his bachelor"s degree in 1952 and doctoral degree in 1958, both from the University of Tokyo. Until 1960, he conducted research at that university"s Earthquake Research Institute.

He then did post-doctoral research at the Caltech Seismological Laboratory, where he worked with Frank Press.

Press invited Aki to join him at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966. This second visit to the United States coincided with the 1966 Parkfield earthquake, noteworthy for its so-called coda waves, reverberations of seismic energy due to multiple scattering from subsurface inhomogeneities.

Aki “developed a passion for using those waves to investigate Earth,” according to Bill Ellsworth, Aki"s former student who was later head of the United States Geological Survey seismology group. “He came from Japan as a statistically oriented seismologist, but he was not afraid to transform himself.” Aki was very active in his field and was the president or chair of many organizations.

He was the president of Seismological Section of the American Geophysical Union, president of the Seismological Society of America, and Chair of the National Academy of Sciences, USA Committee on Seismology.

He was instrumental in the creation of the Southern California Earthquake Center, headquartered at the University of Southern California, in 1991, he having moved to University of Southern California from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984. In 1995, Aki moved to the seismically active island Réunion, east of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, where he continued to work until his death there in 2005. He sustained an injury to his brain from a fall while walking in the street on May 13.

He fell into a coma and died on May 17.

Achievements

• Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1973) Election to the United States. National Academy of Sciences (1979) Medal of Seismological Society of America (1986) Thorarinsson Medal from the International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth"s Interior (2000) William Bowie Medal of the American Geophysical Union (2004) Beno Gutenberg Medal of the European Geosciences Union (2005).

Membership

National Academy of Sciences. American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Connections

Father:

Koichi Aki

Mother:

Humiko (Kojima) Aki

Spouse:

Haruko Uyeda

child:

Zenta Aki

child:

Shota Aki

child:

Kajika Aki