Dr Voon Hui Lai
Contacts
An observational seismologist by training, I'm interested in (1) advancing seismic knowledge towards building resilience against natural hazards and environmental changes; and (2) understanding the interconnectedness between Earth's systems. I deploy seismic arrays and perform waveform modeling (e.g., seismic source inversion, waveform simulation) to record seismic waves and reveal how waveform complexities are results of dynamic source processes and fine-scale structural heterogeneities.
My research journey has taken me to explore many intriguing problems including modeling volcanic sources and debris flows, simulating earthquake ground motion in sedimentary basins, connecting deep earth processes to their mineral composition, and understanding how solid earth-atmospheric waves couple. At Research School of Earth Sciences, I use Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), a new generation fibre-optics based seismic array, to transform how we can perform high resolution subsurface and source characterizations, at places from rural outbacks to urban metropolitans.
Research interests
Natural hazards, fibre-optic sensing, environmental seismology, near surface geophysics, seismoacoustics, deep earth
Groups
- Researcher, Earth systems
- Researcher, Extreme events and future scenarios
- Researcher, Water and flooding