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Professor Tim Wright

Professor Tim Wright

  • Position: Professor of Satellite Geodesy; Director of NERC COMET; Director of Research and Innovation (School of Earth and Environment)
  • Areas of expertise: deformation; satellite geodesy; earthquakes; volcanoes; ground subsidence; earth observation; InSAR; satellites
  • Email: T.J.Wright@leeds.ac.uk
  • Phone: +44(0)113 343 5258
  • Location: 7.26 Priestley Building
  • Website: Twitter | LinkedIn | Googlescholar | ORCID

Profile

Tim Wright has been at Leeds since 2006, initially as a Royal Society University Research Fellow and (since 2012) as Professor of Satellite Geodesy. His work has been at the forefront of developing the use of satellite radar interferometry (InSAR) for measuring tectonic and volcanic deformation. Major achievements include the first demonstration that inter-seismic strain can be measured using InSAR, in this case for the North Anatolian Fault; the investigation of a series of major earthquakes using geodesy, seismology and geomorphology, including Bam (Iran, 2003), Denali (Alaska, 2002), and Izmit (Turkey, 1999); the mapping and modelling of precursory inflation at a volcanic centre (Dabbahu, Ethiopia), and the subsequent discovery of a major rifting episode in Afar, Ethiopia. He has published more than 135 articles in major international journals, and his work is highly cited. He led the NERC-funded Afar Rift Consortium, a £3M project that is using a wide range of geophysical, geochemical and geologic techniques to investigate how the crust grows at divergent plate boundaries, and co-led LICS, a NERC large grant to "Look Inside the Continents from Space", which is producing open-access InSAR data over global volcanic and tectonic areas from Sentinel-1. In 2006, he was awarded the William Smith Fund of the Geological Society, and a Philip Leverhulme Prize, in 2014 he received the AGU Geodesy Section Award, and in 2015 he was the British Geophysical Association's Bullerwell lecturer and received the Rosenstiel Award from the University of Miami. He was the Royal Astronomical Society's 2017 Harold Jeffreys Lecturer. He is director of the NERC Centre for the Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics (COMET), and co-founder and director of SatSense Ltd. Since August 2023, he has been Director of Research and Innovation in the School of Earth and Environment. 

ResearcherID: http://www.researcherid.com/rid/A-5892-2011

Postdocs and PhD students

  • Yasser Maghsoudi
  • Milan Lazecky
  • Scott Watson
  • Jin Fang
  • Pedro Espin Bedon
  • Jack McGrath
  • Fei Liu
  • Jacob Connolly
  • Manon Carpenter
  • Daniel Sefton
  • Reza Bordbari
  • Natalie Forrest
  • Dehua Wang
  • Muhammet Nergizci
  • Yuan Gao

Former Students and Group Members

  • Juliet Biggs (University of Bristol)
  • Emma Bramham (University of Leeds)
  • John Elliott (University of Leeds)
  • Matt Garthwaite (Geoscience Australia)
  • Ian Hamling (GNS, New Zealand)
  • Carolina Pagli (University of Pisa)
  • Hua Wang (Guangdong University of Technology)
  • David Bekaert (NASA JPL)
  • Pablo Gonzalez (University of Liverpool)
  • Jo Hamlyn (TerraDat UK Ltd)
  • Barbara Hofmann (HR Wallingford)
  • Ekbal Hussain (British Geological Survey)
  • Victoria Nockles
  • Richard Walters (University of Durham)
  • Qiu Qiang (EOS Singapore)
  • Alistair McDougall (Anaplan)
  • Ruth Amey (University of Leeds)
  • Matt Gaddes (University of Leeds)
  • Jeanne Giniaux (CGG Limited)
  • Tom Ingleby (SatSense Ltd)
  • George Taylor (University of Helsinki)
  • Chris Moore (Natural England)
  • Lin Shen (University of Leeds)
  • Huw Goodall (JBA Risk Limited)
  • Josh Williams (ESG Solutions Ltd)
  • Katherine Willis
  • Karsten Spaans (SatSense Ltd)
  • Jonathan Weiss (University of Potsdam)
  • Emma Hatton (Orbital Wave Ltd)

Videos of Recent Talks

Responsibilities

  • Director of NERC COMET; Director of Research and Innovation (School of Earth and Environment)
<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Any research projects I'm currently working on will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Research groups and institutes

  • Geodynamics and Tectonics
  • Institute of Geophysics and Tectonics

Current postgraduate researchers

<h4>Postgraduate research opportunities</h4> <p>We welcome enquiries from motivated and qualified applicants from all around the world who are interested in PhD study. Our <a href="https://phd.leeds.ac.uk">research opportunities</a> allow you to search for projects and scholarships.</p>