Frederik J. Simons


Frederik J. Simons is a Flemish Belgian
geophysicist. He is a professor at Princeton University in the Department of Geosciences.
From 2010 to 2013, Simons was the
Dusenbury University Preceptor of Geological & Geophysical Sciences. From 2004 to 2006, he was a lecturer in the Department of Earth Sciences at University College London. Between 2002 and 2004 he was a
Harry H. Hess Postdoctoral Fellow in the
Department of Geosciences and a Beck Fellow with the Council on
Science and Technology, also at Princeton University.
Simons has worked on a variety of theoretical problems in solid-earth geophysics, seismology, geodesy, and geomagnetism.
He has made numerous contributions to the study of Earth's mantle, continental structure and evolution using seismic tomography,
the analysis of sea level change in the Last Interglacial
and of ice sheet mass variations though the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, and to the theory of spatiospectral localization via prolate spheroidal wave functions.
Simons is involved in the design of marine instrumentation for recording earthquakes, specifically iterations of MERMAID.

Education

Frederik Simons was born in Antwerp, Belgium. He graduated primus perpetuus from Our Lady College, Antwerp Jesuit School in 1992. Simons earned his Bachelor's and Master's of Science from KU Leuven in 1996, and his Ph.D. in Geophysics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002.

Academic career

Simons has worked on a variety of theoretical problems in solid-earth geophysics, seismology, geodesy, and geomagnetism.
Also involved in the design of instrumentation, he founded the international EarthScope-Oceans consortium, devoted to instrumenting the oceans for global geophysics.
A well-known example is the MERMAID instrument, a passively drifting autonomous mid-column hydrophone. The idea of collecting earthquake data for global tomography by robotic drifters is credited to Guust Nolet, a Princeton Professor of geophysics emeritus, who was Simons' postdoctoral advisor. With their colleagues at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, they launched the first MERMAID prototype in 2003. The second-generation MERMAID was built by Teledyne Webb Research with support from the European Research Council. The third-generation MERMAID was developed with Yann Hello and is commercialized by French engineering company OSEAN SAS.
The fourth generation is a dual-use instrument equipped, in addition to the hydrophone package, with a conductivity, temperature, and depth (CTD) sensor capable of carrying out hydrographic profiles down to 4,000 m depth, adding to the Argo fleet.

Awards