The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), headquartered at the University of Southern California, was founded in 1991 with a mission to:

• gather data on earthquakes in Southern California and elsewhere;
• integrate information into a comprehensive and physics-based understanding of earthquake phenomena; and
• communicate understanding to society at large as useful knowledge for reducing earthquake risk.

An outstanding community of over 600 scientists from 16 Core Institutions, 47 Participating Institutions, and elsewhere participate in SCEC. SCEC also partners with a large number of other research and education/outreach organizations in many disciplines. Funding for SCEC activities is provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

To support this community, SCEC engages in information technology research that will revolutionize our methods of doing collaborative research and distributing research products on-line. In addition, the SCEC Communication, Education, and Outreach Program offers student research experiences, web-based education tools, classroom curricula, museum displays, public information brochures, online newsletters, and technical workshops and publications.

To learn more about SCEC, review the annual reports and proposals on the SCEC Documents page. SCEC-related activities are listed on the Calendar page.

How to participate

SCEC is a research collaboration, not a funding agency; therefore, it does not have a grants program. However, we do support scientists to participate in the collaboration through (small) subcontracts, and this is an open process.

The main event is the SCEC Annual Meeting in September, which all collaboration members are expected to attend. This meeting is also the best place to get involved as a new SCEC collaborator. There we develop the next year's science plans and set up for our "recruitment process". This is based on miniproposals submitted in November by scientists who want to participate, or continue to participate, in the collaboration; they are internally reviewed by the SCEC Planning Committee in January, and the final collaboration plan is approved by the SCEC Board of Directors in early February.

To request to be added to the SCEC Community e-mail list, where the above activities are announced, please complete our information form.