Annual Meeting - SCEC.org

State of SCEC, 2008
Thomas H. Jordan
SCEC Director
SCEC Director | Report
Welcome to the 2008 Annual Meeting!
This is SCEC’s 18th Annual Meeting and the second community-wide gathering under the fiveyear
SCEC3 program. The agenda features some very interesting presentations by keynote
speakers, planning sessions for all the major working groups, an outstanding set of science posters,
and a variety of IT demonstrations, education & outreach activities, and social gatherings. Five
workshops and a student field trip are scheduled on the weekend before the meeting, and a major
workshop on the Salton Trough Seismic Project will begin immediately afterwards.
The richness of the week’s activities indicates how well the Center is working. SCEC has grown
into one of the largest collaborations in geoscience, a fact reflected in the rising participation in our
annual collaboration meeting (Figure 1): 453 people have pre-registered this year (compared to 446
last year), and 252 poster abstracts have been submitted. This will be the first annual meeting for
139 of this year’s pre-registrants, so we can look forward to seeing many new faces!
Figure 1. Registrants at SCEC Annual Meetings, 1991-2008. Number for 2008 (453) is
pre-registrants.
Goals of the Meeting
The agenda for the Annual Meeting developed by Greg Beroza and the Planning Committee is
designed to achieve three goals. The first is to share our individual scientific results and plans with
our many SCEC collaborators; for this reason, the agenda includes lots of poster-viewing time and
informal sessions around the pool. The second is to mark our progress toward the priority
objectives of the SCEC3 Science Plan, which are summarized in the 19 bullet points of Table 1. Each
year, we try to assess our achievements in the SCEC Annual Report, and we would like to report
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