DeFord Lecture Series
DeFord Lecture Series Speaker Schedule
The DeFord (Technical Sessions) lecture series has been a requirement and a tradition for all geosciences graduate students since the late 1940s. Once the official venue for disseminating Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences graduate student research, the DeFord Lecture series is now the forum for lectures by distinguished visitors and members of our community. Faculty and researchers from the Jackson School have invited prestigious researchers from around the world to present a lecture in this series. This is made possible only through a series of endowments, such as those funding past Distinguished Lectures.
The list below shows all the scheduled talks this semester. If you would like to meet with any of the speakers, please contact them or their hosts directly.
DeFord Lecture Series Fall 2026 Speaker Schedule
All talks are on Thursdays from 3:30-4:30 p.m. in the Boyd Auditorium (JGB 2.324). Lectures will be recorded, and most past lectures are posted on the Jackson School YouTube channel.
Sept. 3
University of Texas at Austin
Climate Risk in an Era of Rapidly Evolving Human Emissions
Sept. 10
Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences
Digital Twins and Their Impact Across Science, Technology and Society
Sept. 24
University of California, Santa Cruz
How Earthquakes Organize Stress
Abstract: Stress is not uniform in the Earth. Therefore, we must use natural experiments to measure the distribution of stresses and related quantities, rather than single values. For instance, dynamic triggering shows that faults are uniformly distributed over their loading cycles in Southern California. The probability that a fault ruptures across a barrier measures the in situ energy distribution. Fault roughness reflects the distribution of strength. These natural experiments produce observable distributions that are surprisingly consistent and suggest some degree of self-organization in the Earth’s crust. Once established, the functional form of the distributions can be used to track changes in response to earthquakes as well as to distinguish fundamentally different fault systems. Transient fault locking before stress release in laboratory experiments can be interpreted as a consequence of self-organization of fault stress. The robust self-organization of multiple variables in earthquake systems suggests that the most consequential mechanical outcome of earthquakes may be the redistribution of stress and the strain energy associated with it. The low friction on a fault during seismic slip as inferred by temperature measurements of the Tohoku earthquake is consistent with dissipation playing a secondary role to this redistribution process. Through stress redistribution and interaction, subduction zone faults tend to synchronize, perhaps due to their geometric simplicity, while the continental system of Southern California cannot synchronize, perhaps due to the complexity of the fault network. Earthquakes organize stress in the crust and produce a suite of well-defined, consistent distributions.
Oct. 1
Texas A&M University
How Stratiform Rain Shapes Weather, Climate, and the Geological Record
Oct. 22
National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience, Japan
How Landslides Grow into Disasters on a Changing Earth