Bio

I began studying geophysics at the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe (now KIT) in 1982. Before getting my Diploma degree I spent two years in Edinburgh working as a research student with Prof. Stuart Crampin. From 1990-1993 was supervised by Profs Albert Tarantola and Peter Mora at the Institut de Physique du Globe in my PhD project on seismic modelling and inversion. We were lucky to have access to one of the first parallel machines, the Connection Machine CM-2. From 1994-1999 I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Geophysics at the University of Cambridge, UK, working primarily on global wave propagation. Since 1999 I am a professor of seismology at LMU.

CV Heiner Igel (PDF, 180 KB)

Roles

  • 1999 Editor PEPI Special Issue on Computational Seismology Since
  • 1999 Reviewer for National Science Funding for Germany, Switzerland, USA, France, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia.
  • 2004-2024 Coordinator of EU-funded training networks SPICE and QUEST, Co-PI SPIN
  • Since 2007 Co-initiator and Chair of International Working Group of Rotational Seismology, main organizer of all 6 international workshops
  • 2008-2015 Member editorial board Journal of Seismology
  • 2009, 2012, 2021 Editor Special Issues on Rotational Seismology (BSSA, JSeis, Sensors)
  • Since 2010 Panel Member Evaluation European Fellowships, ERC Grants
  • Since 2010 Science Officer in the Seismology Division EGU
  • 2010-2016 Topical editor Solid Earth
  • Since 2011 Annual SKIENCE winterschool (www.skience.de) in seismology
  • 2015 Vice-Chair Evaluation Panel European Training Networks
  • 2015 Initiation of online Jupyter notebooks www.seismo-live.org
  • 2023 EarthScope Integration & Innovation Advisory Committee
  • 2025 AGU Gutenberg Lecture Committee

Awards

  • 1992 Best student paper award, International Workshop on Seismic Anisotropy, Banff, 1992
  • 1994 Fellowship by the Isaac Newton Trust, Cambridge
  • 1996 Visiting Fellow ANU Canberra
  • 1998 Heisenberg Fellowship (German National Science Foundation)
  • 2008/2022/2023 Cecil-and-Ida Green Fellow SCRIPPS
  • 2008 Visiting Professor Los Alamos National Laboratory
  • 2013 Advanced Grant European Research Council
  • Since 2013 Fellow of the Center of Advanced Studies (LMU Munich)
  • 2016 Elected full member of the German National Academy of Sciences
  • 2021/2022 Visiting Professor IPG Paris
  • 2025 AGU Fellow


Press

Research

I am interested in all aspects of seismic waves from observing then on Earth, in the oceans, and on planets; how to use ground motions to infer the structure of the interior or the dynamics of seismic sources; how to accurately simulate seismic wave propagation to match observations. Currently my main research interest is how to understand complete ground motion including rotational motions, how to observe them accurately, and how to use the combined observations (6 DoF) with seismometers to solve science problems.

Graphical illustration of the ROMY ring laser installed in Fürstenfeldbruck (from Hand)

Graphical illustration of the ROMY ring laser installed in Fürstenfeldbruck (from Hand) | © Science, 2017

Rotational Seismology

We are interested in integrating all aspects of rotational ground motion into Earth System Monitoring. This applies to the observation of earthquakes, the natural and induced seismic background noise, the potential of using these observations in planetary seismology, volcanology, oceanography, and borehole geophysics. While using ring lasers at our Observatory Fürstenfeldbruck and at the Fundamentalstation Wettzell we also push the development of portable rotation sensing systems and make use of our pool of rotations sensors such as BlueSeis-3A and lower-resolution 6-component inertial measurement units (IMU). We also see applications in structural health monitoring.

Running projects

Tang, L., Igel, H., Montagner, J.-P., & Vernon, F. (2024). Seismic anisotropy from 6C ground motions of ambient seismic noise. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 129, e2024JB028959. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JB028959

Tang, L., Igel, H., & Montagner, J.-P. (2023). Anisotropy and deformation processes in Southern California from rotational observations. Geophysical Research Letters, 50, e2023GL105970. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023GL105970

Igel, H., K.U. Schreiber, A. Gebauer, F. Bernauer, S. Egdorf, A. Simonelli, C.-J. Lin, J. Wassermann, S. Donner, C. Hadziioannou, S. Yuan, A. Brotzer, J. Kodet, T. Tanimoto, U. Hugentobler, and J.-P.R. Wells. Romy: A multicomponent ring laser for geodesy and geophysics. Geophysical Journal International, Volume 225, Issue 1, April 2021, Pages 684–698, https://doi.org/10.1093/gji/ggaa614

Bernauer, F., Behnen, K., Wassermann, J., Egdorf, S., Igel, H., Donner, S., Stammler, K., Hoffmann, M., Edme, P., Sollberger, D., Schmelzbach, C., Robertsson, J., Paitz, P., Igel, J., Smolinski, K., Fichtner, A., Rossi, Y., Izgi, G., Vollmer, D., ... Brokesova, J. (2021). Rotation, Strain, and Translation Sensors Performance Tests with Active Seismic Sources. Sensors, 21(1), 264. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21010264

Illustration of peak ground motion from a simulation of the 2015 M7.8 Gorkha Earthquake in the Kathmandu Basin

Illustration of peak ground motion from a simulation of the 2015 M7.8 Gorkha Earthquake in the Kathmandu Basin | © Zihua Niu

Computational Seismology

We continue to push seismic simulation technology to become ever more realistic. This involves extending rheologies to nonlinear behavior and exploring the effects on ground motion and the dynamics of earthquake rupture. Furthermore we aim at making (expensive) supercomputer wavefield simulations accessible and usable by the science community.

Projects

  • EU Training network SPIN (2020-2025), www.spin-itn.eu, EU
  • NFDI4Earth, Lighthouse Use Case (2026-2029), tbc, DFG

Niu, Z., Gabriel, A.-A., Seelinger, L., & Igel, H. (2024). Modeling and quantifying parameter uncertainty of co-seismic non-classical nonlinearity in rocks. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 129, e2023JB027149. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JB027149

Niu, Z., Gabriel, A.-A., Wolf, S., Ulrich, T., Lyakhovsky, V., & Igel, H. (2025). A discontinuous Galerkin method for simulating 3D seismic wave propagation in nonlinear rock models: Verification and application to the Mw 7.8 2015 Gorkha, Nepal Earthquake. Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, 130, e2025JB031378. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025JB031378

Seismic Exploration for Future Space Missions

Seismic Exploration for Future Space Missions (illustration from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvpKsUklCDs) | © DRL KN Swarm Systems

Planetary seismology

How does the ground move on planetary objects like the moon, Mars, asteroids, comets? What are good instrumentation strategies to characterize these motions? What sensor do we need? How can we design experiment in these challenging environments. These questions we address in some of our projects.

Running projects

Bernauer, F. R.F. Garcia, N. Murdoch, V. Dehant, D. Sollberger, C. Schmelzbach, S. St¨ahler, J. Wassermann, H. Igel, A. Cadu, D. Mimoun, B. Ritter, V. Filice, ¨ O. Karatekin, L. Ferraioli, J.O.A. Robertsson, D. Giardini, G. Lecamp, F. Guattari, J.-J. Bonnefois, and S. de Raucourt. Exploring planets and asteroids with 6dof sensors: Utopia and realism. Earth Planets Space 72, 191 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40623-020-01333-9

Keil, S., Igel, H., Schimmel, M., Lindner, F., & Bernauer, F. (2024). Investigating subsurface properties of the shallow lunar crust using seismic interferometry on synthetic and recorded data. Earth and Space Science, 11, e2024EA003742. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EA003742

Joshi, R., Knapmeyer-Endrun, B., Mosegaard, K., Igel, H., & Christensen, U. R. (2021). Joint inversion of receiver functions and apparent incidence angles for sparse seismic data. Earth and Space Science, 8, e2021EA001733. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021EA001733

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