Dr. Keith Koper's Research Group at the University of Utah

In April 23, at the annual award lunch, Dr. Keith Koper received this academic year’s Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award. Edie Raines won the Outstanding Student in Geophysics. Valerie Springer won the Outstanding Student in Geological Engineering. Many congratulations to them! Members of our group had a great showing at the departmental poster session 2026 on the morning of April 23! Sean won Second Place in the graduate poster session and Valerie won Third Place in undergra

Dr. Keith Koper, together with Sean Hutchings, Relu Burlacu and Valerie Springer in our group and collaborators, has published a new paper titled “The 10 September 2025 Mw 4.1 Earthquake in Northeastern Utah” in The Seismic Record on April 10, 2026! This work was conducted in collaboration with researcher Katherine Whidden from the University of Utah Seismograph Stations (UUSS) and Dr. Tibi from Sandia National Laboratorie, and investigates an unusually deep (~68 km) earthqu

Grad student, Sean Hutchings, has published a new paper titled " A seismically active shear zone in the uppermost mantle beneath the Canadian Rockies " in Geophysical Research Letters on Jan. 7th! This work was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Koper and Dr. Pang from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC, China) and investigates seismic activity associated with an uppermost-mantle shear zone beneath the Canadian Rockies. Congratulations to Sean and his co-a

Keith and Jiaqi presented at the AGU annual meeting in New Orleans. Here is the information of the poster: Geng, J., Koper, K., & West, J (poster). Enhancing the Observability of Precritical PKiKP Phases with Polarization Filters and Incoherent Array Processing. Here is the link of iPoster: https://agu25.ipostersessions.com/default.aspx?s=E4-1D-A7-9A-1E-7D-90-BC-2F-AB-27-19-38-4B-77-38&guestview=true In addition, Jiaqi received a University of Utah travel grant of approximate

We are pleased to welcome Sawyer Butler, a junior undergraduate student, and Edie Raines, a senior undergraduate student, from the Department of Geology & Geophysics to our research group. Sawyer will be working with graduate student Sean Hutchings to analyze mantle earthquakes in continental regions. Edie will focus on the distinguishing between tectonic earthquakes, explosions and induced earthquakes. Welcome to the group, Sawyer and Edie. We are excited to have you both an

We are pleased to announce that Alysha Armstrong has successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation today and earned her doctoral degree in...

Grad student, Sean Hutchings, had his paper titled " Simulating High‐Frequency Seismograms in Realistic Earth Models to Better Understand...

Sean and Alysha both had papers published this month. Sean's work titled " Upper Mantle Earthquakes Along the Edge of the Wyoming Craton...

PhD student, Sean Hutchings, will be interning with Sandia National Labs over the summer. He will be using machine learning for source discrimination. Congrats, Sean!