Frederik J. Simons - About Me
Frederik J. Simons joined the faculty in September 2006. Currently an Assistant Professor of Geosciences, he is also the Dusenbury University Preceptor of Geological & Geophysical Sciences and an Associated Faculty member in the Program in Applied & Computational Mathematics.
Previously, he was a Lecturer at University College London, a Princeton Council of Science & Technology Beck Fellow and a Department of Geosciences Hess Post-doctoral Fellow. His Ph.D. in Geophysics is from M.I.T. and his M.Sc. in Geology from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, of which he is a native.
His research encompasses various aspects of solid-earth geophysics. Most notably, he studies the physical properties of the terrestrial lithosphere, focusing in particular on the elastic and thermomechanical properties of the continents, by seismic tomography and the spectral analysis of gravity and topography. With his colleagues, Frederik has developed mathematical methods for the analysis of processes on the sphere, for geodesy, geomagnetism, and cosmology, designed wavelet-based signal processing methods for seismology, and developed oceanic instrumentation to close the seismic coverage gap over the Earth's oceans.
Read more about this last project, nicknamed Mermaid for the first and Son-O-Mermaid for the second prototype, here, in the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, in The Economist, in NERC's magazine Planet Earth, and in Nature Magazine.
Find out more about some of his work on Slepian functions and spherical wavelets via this YouTube lecture on "promoting sparsity and localization in geophysical inverse problems."
With post-doc Bob Kopp, Princeton colleagues Adam Maloof and Michael Oppenheimer and Harvard's Jerry Mitrovica, Frederik wrote a widely publicized article in Nature reconstructing the history of sea level fluctuations during the Last Interglacial (about 125 thousand years ago, and thought to be a good analogue for Earth's immediate future), using a probabilistic approach informed by geologic indicators and by the geophysics of sea level change. Read more about this work here, on the Princeton Web News homepage, in The Guardian, The Independent, Newsweek, Time Magazine, U.S.News & World Report, or in many other international publications in print and on the web.
At Princeton, Frederik has taught Global and Introductory Geophysics (GEO320 & GEO371/PHY371), Data, Models & Uncertainty in the Natural Sciences (GEO422), and co-taught Fundamentals of the Geosciences I and II (GEO505, GEO506), Origin and Evolution of the Continental Lithosphere (GEO556) with Blair Schoene, and the Freshman Seminars Earth's Changing Surface & Climate (FRS149 & FRS145) and Earth's Environments & Ancient Civilizations, the latter two with Adam Maloof.
A more comprehensive vita can be found here.