Barbara Romanowicz

Barbara A. Romanowicz (born April 5, 1950) is a French geophysicist and an expert on imaging the earth's interior.

Romanowicz was born in Suresnes, France.

Barbara Romanowicz is the daughter of Kazimierz Romanowicz and Zofia Romanowiczowa. The first years of Barbara's life were an inspiration for Zofia Romanowiczowa's debut novel entitled Baśka and Barbara.

Romanowicz received a BSc degree in mathematics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, a MSc in applied physics from Harvard University and PhDs in astronomy from Pierre and Marie Curie University and in geophysics from Paris Diderot University.

From 1979 to 1981, Romanowicz was a postdoctoral research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1982 to 1990, while working as a researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), she developed a global network of seismic stations known as GEOSCOPE to study earthquakes and the interior structure of the earth. From 1990 to 2011, she was director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory; she was also a professor in the Earth and Planetary Science department at the University of California, Berkeley. During her time at the Berkeley laboratory, she helped develop a real-time earthquake notification system for northern California. In 2011 she was named to the chair of Physics of the Earth Interior at the Collège de France, where she regularly organises symposiums on topics related to the evolution of the Earth.

She has been European editor for Geophysical Research Letters and editor for Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors.

She was awarded the silver medal by the CNRS in 1992. In 1999, she received the Alfred Wegener Medal [de]. In 2005, she was named to the American National Academy of Sciences. In 2009, she received the Inge Lehmann Medal. In 2011, she was awarded the Harry Fielding Reid Medal by the Seismological Society of America. She was bestowed the highest honor given by the American Geophysical Union, the William Bowie Medal in 2019.

She is the founding mother of Cooperative Institute for Dynamic Earth Research (CIDER).

Honors and Awards

• 1990 Fellow, American Geophysical Union
• 1992 Silver Medal of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
• 1999 Alfred Wegner Medal of the European Union of Geosciences
• 2001 Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2003 Gutenberg Medal, European Geophysical Society
• 2005 Member, National Academy of Sciences
• 2008 Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, France
• 2009 Inge Lehmann Medal of the American Geophysical Union
• 2010 Miller Professor, University of California, Berkeley
• 2011 Harry Reid Medal of the Seismological Society of America
• 2013 Elected Member, Académie des Sciences, France
• 2019 William Bowie Medal of the American Geophysical Union

In 1979, Romanowicz married Mark Jonikas.