This summer we’re introducing interns from Student Career, RESESS, and Geo-Launchpad programs to highlight their research projects and how EarthScope programs further their career goals.

Juan Cruz (he/him) is from Houston, Texas and is entering his senior year at University of Houston majoring in geophysics. He is currently a RESESS intern working in Boulder, Colorado working with Kathryn Materna and Daniel Gittens. Juan is leaning towards applying to Ph.D. programs for after he graduates. He enjoys doing research and wants to help push the boundary of human knowledge.

Q&A

How did you get into geophysics and geoscience?

I started out as a biology major and after evaluating career prospects and getting to the point where I had to take organic chemistry, I decided to find something else. I took other classes and explored other topics for like two years. The whole time I thought I was going to get into some type of engineering, so I was taking a lot of math classes. Then I met a friend who told me about geophysics and since I already had the required math classes and I like planetary science, I chose geophysics.

Have you done any research or field work in your undergraduate career?

I have helped with research in terms of doing field work. I’ve deployed geophones and I helped set up a GPS station. UH has this research center called the Coastal Center, and there is a professor there who has three or four GPS stations and is trying to measure soil moisture and how that affects what they call elastic rebound. It has to do with moisture, like depletion and drying out.

Where are you and what are you doing this summer?

I’m in Boulder, Colorado working with Daniel Gittens on creep events. Kathryn also helps with the code and general guidance as well. I’m mostly looking at what creep events are—these really small aseismic movements on the scale of millimeters along faults. The San Andreas has some parts that have seismic activity and some parts that are aseismic, and Dan spent four months manually picking these creep events out. There are these instruments called creepmeters. Another professor here, his name is Roger Bilham, he makes these instruments. He actually came up with them during his Ph.D, and they are the most popular designs. So mostly all the data that’s in the catalog is data that he has collected with these instruments, and now I’m helping Dan with some statistical analysis on these creep events. I started out with tectonic stuff, trying to see if there was like a tectonic trigger for it. I started out by looking at earthquakes of magnitude three or higher and mostly seeing “Here’s this creep event, was there anything in the previous 30 seconds locally?” I ended up not finding anything, so maybe smaller magnitude things are triggering it. But we decided to move on to rain next. 

So this research is on creep events—they’ve been known about for a while, [but] we don’t really understand what causes them so that’s kind of what we’re trying to [do]. So it’s just statistical analysis right now working with the catalog.

How did you find this internship and what attracted you to it?

I don’t remember really but the thing that interested me about it was that I wanted to come to Boulder, so I knew that was a possibility. I’d been to Colorado before and I guess at the time that I was applying I was considering going for grad school. Now I don’t really care where I end up. I guess it just depends on the research and funding. I knew of EarthScope, and EarthScope is mostly geophysics, and so being a geophysics major I think I thought projects would be really relevant to me. 

Have you learned any new topics or skills that have piqued your interest that you’ll use later on?

Definitely Python, that’s always preferred in research and science. That’s great to refresh myself on—I’ve only taken one class before. I’m getting a deeper understanding of it and I find myself looking at the documentation more than before. [I can find ways that are more] efficient and I think just having better familiarization with Python has been something I got.

Is there anything coming up that you’re looking forward to or any goals you’re looking to fulfill?

I definitely am excited about going to AGU. I’m excited to go and to see the other kinds of science that are out there, maybe help refine my interests a little bit more, maybe meet faculty that I could possibly work with. And then the poster’s nice too, I get more experience making posters and especially something that I’m in charge of—I’ve only made posters either where it’s not my own data or it’s a group poster, so having my own poster to represent my own work is exciting.