UAF awards first Schaible Geophysical Institute Fellowship
Rod Boyce
907-474-7185
Sept. 20, 2021
Alexandru Lapadat enjoys some wind near Eagle and Symphony lakes in the Chugach Mountains east of Anchorage in 2017.
Alexandru Lapadat has a story Alaskans often hear from visitors who come back to the
state after a first visit.
“I was here once four years ago doing some traveling with my family and hiking,” he
said. “It's beautiful. I think a part of me just stayed here.”
Now the rest of him is here for a much longer stay as a student working toward a doctorate
in geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks — and as the first recipient of
the two-year Schaible Geophysical Institute Fellowship.
Grace Berg Schaible, a former Alaska attorney general and one of the University of
Alaska’s greatest benefactors, established the fellowship for graduate students whose
principal course of study is in subjects taught or researched at the Geophysical Institute.
Schaible died in 2017, but the fellowship’s endowment received a $2.2 million gift
from her estate in 2018, providing enough of a financial base so that planning for
the awarding of fellowships could begin.
“I am grateful, and I hope this can continue for other prospective students,” said
Lapadat, who arrived in Fairbanks in mid-August and was awarded the fellowship Sept.
10.
The fellowship means Lapadat can focus entirely on his own research — improving the
accuracy of earthquake magnitude determinations.
“People are mainly interested in magnitude and when an earthquake will reach them,”
he said, “so we will look at how to make this more precise and then how to make it
work in real time as an early warning.”
He aims to use the Global Navigation Satellite System to measure ground displacement
during large earthquakes and analyze that information to quickly and precisely determine
magnitude. That would allow alerts to be sent to areas where seismic waves have yet
to reach.
It’s a major challenge, but information delivered electronically travels faster than
the surface S waves of an earthquake. That could mean seconds to minutes of advance
warning of potentially disastrous shaking.
Alexandru Lapadat works in Theistareykir, Iceland. "I was having my first encounter with the harsh Icelandic weather in July 2018. Establishing geodetic networks was and still is one of my favorite tasks as a geodesist," he said.
Lapadat is working at the Geophysical Institute with adviser Ronni Grapenthin, an
associate professor in the UAF College of Natural Science and Mathematics.
“This fellowship allows for a kind of research a little different from what usually
gets funded and puts the student more in the driver's seat of designing what they
want to do,” Grapenthin said.
Lapadat started toward his eventual field of interest long ago in his small Transylvanian
hometown of Sibiu, Romania.
“My mom asked me, ‘What interests you?,’ and I started by saying ‘I like math, I like
geography, I like being out,’” he said. “So she said to go for a surveying camp during
the summer. I liked it and started on geodesy, which is the science of representing
the Earth's crust and everything that's on it.”
He later studied at Samuel von Brukenthal National College in Sibiu and at Technical
University of Constructions Bucharest. He obtained his master’s in applied Earth sciences
from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
The Schaible Geophysical Institute Fellowship will have a long-lasting impact.
"Grace Schaible was an amazing woman and a legend in Alaska," Geophysical Institute
Director Robert McCoy said. "I’m sure she would have been pleased to see how her estate
is helping this future scientist perform research and pursue a graduate degree. The
generosity of her estate will allow the Geophysical Institute to support young scientists
for many years to come."
ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Alexandru Lapadat, alapadat@alaska.edu; Ronni Grapenthin, 907-474-7286, rgrapenthin@alaska.edu
NOTE TO EDITORS: Photographs are available at gi.alaska.edu