Sylvain Barbot is a post-doctoral scholar at the California Institute  of Technology. He is working with Professor Nadia Lapusta and  Professor Jean-Philippe Avouac to develop new ways to make predictive models of the earthquake cycle on the San Andreas Fault using large-scale numerical computations. Sylvain received a Master of  Science at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris in France, where he was mentored by the late Professor Albert Tarantola. Later, he  graduated with another Masters and a PhD from the Scripps Institution  of Oceanography, part of the University of California at San Diego.  There, he worked with Professor Yuri Fialko to create complex models  of the coseismic and postseismic deformation following large  earthquakes. Sylvain's scientific interest focuses on understanding the physics of the earthquake cycle, from earthquake nucleation and  rupture to the evolution of damage zones and the lithospheric-scale poroelastic and viscoelastic rebound. Sylvain's publications and  publicly available software can be found online at http://www.its.caltech.edu/~sbarbot/.

Advances in observational, laboratory, and modeling techniques provide increasingly rich findings about the earthquake source behavior on various spatial and temporal scales. Now the challenge is to develop unifying models capable of integrating a wide range of observations using realistic fault physics. Here, we build the first fully dynamic model of a fault segment that quantitatively reproduces its behavior over the entire earthquake cycle. In the model, a rate-and-state fault is tuned to the wealth of data for the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas Fault. The model succeeds in reproducing a realistic earthquake sequence of irregular Mw~6 mainshocks - including events similar to the ones in 1966 and 2004 - and provides an excellent match to the detailed inter-, co-, and post-seismic observations during the most recent earthquake cycle. Such calibrated physical models may be used in the future to assess seismic hazard and forecast seismicity response to perturbations of natural or anthropogenic origins.