Eric Kiser received his Bachelor's Degree in Geology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and is currently a fifth-year graduate student at Harvard University, expecting to complete his Ph.D. in 2012.  He has been investigating characteristics of large earthquakes, ranging from megathrust events near the surface to poorly-understood deep seismicity.

Following giant earthquakes, such as the 2011 March 11 magnitude 9.0 Japan earthquake, the conventional earthquake detection algorithms have difficulties identifying events.  For example, in the National Earthquake Information Centre (USGS) earthquake catalogue, the first entry after the 2004 magnitude 9.1 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake does not occur until nearly 20 minutes after the mainshock.  The detection and characterization of early aftershocks immediately following a giant earthquake are complicated by the arrival of various seismic waves as well as scattered seismic energy.  These signals are filtered out when the back-projection technique with data from a dense network of seismic stations is used.  Application of the technique to the 2011 Japan earthquake detects numerous events immediately following the mainshock, some of which are not identified in the local earthquake catalogue.  These unidentified events can be of large magnitude, and are potentially tsunamigenic.