Susan Hough

Who is Susan Hough?

Susan Elizabeth Hough is a seismologist at the United States Geological Survey in Pasadena, California, and scientist in charge of the office. She has served as an editor and contributor for many journals and is a contributing editor to Geotimes Magazine. She is the author of five books, including Earthshaking Science.

Hough graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982 and is a University of California, San Diego Alumna, earning her Ph.D. in geophysics from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1987.

She has served on the Board of Directors of the Seismological Society of America from 1998 to 2004 and of the Southern California Earthquake Center from 2006 to 2009.

Subsequent to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Hough led the United States Geological Survey team charged with the installation of seismic stations and accelerometers. The USGS are contributing to earthquake engineering efforts by improving earthquake monitoring and reporting by means of their USGS Advanced National Seismic System. Hough and her team deployed portable seismometers for recording aftershocks of the earthquake, and she continues to cooperate with Haitian seismologosists for setting up permanent seismic monitoring in their country. Areas at risk in future earthquakes are mapped by means of seismic microzonation using local geological conditions to characterize seismic hazard. Normally, the effect of sedimentary layers are considered, however local topography is not considered in this context. However, the results provided by Hough and her team highlighted that topographic amplification played a major role in causing the earthquake damages in Petionville near Port-au-Prince, thereby challenging the conventional view on factors to consider when performing microzonation.