Issue: Autumn 2005

In Memoriam - Keiiti Aki

USC College Professor Emeritus Keiiti Aki, a geophysicist known for his pioneering research on the fundamentals of geophysics and seismology, died May 17 on La Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean. He was 75.

“Kei’s influence in geophysics was broad. He studied a tremendous variety of scientific problems and made substantial contributions in almost all of them,” said University Professor Thomas Jordan, holder of the W.M. Keck Foundation Chair in Geological Sciences and director of the Southern California Earthquake Center.

Aki earned his Ph.D. from the Geophysical Institute of the University of Tokyo in 1958. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Frank Press, then one of the most esteemed geophysicists in the United States.

Aki returned to a faculty position at the University of Tokyo for a number of years before Press, who had been recruited to start a modern, physics-based geology program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, convinced him to join the MIT faculty.

Aki taught at MIT for 18 years before moving to USC College in 1984, where he was the W.M. Keck Foundation Professor of Geological Sciences until his retirement in 2000. In 1991, he became the founding director of SCEC and served as its director until 1996. In a career spanning 50 years, Aki published more than 200 papers in seismology and co-authored the cardinal textbook of his field, Quantitative Seismology.

Beginning in 1995, Aki lived on the seismically active La Réunion, where he continued to investigate the complexities of seismic waves and the active Earth until the time of his death.

In December 2004, Aki received the William Bowie Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the American Geophysical Union, for his “outstanding contributions to fundamental geophysics and for unselfish cooperation in research.” In April, he was honored by the European Geosciences Union, which awarded him its top prize, the Beno Gutenberg Medal.

Aki was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is survived by his wife, geophysicist Valerie Ferrazzini, and four children: sons Shota and Zenta from his first marriage, and daughters Kajika and Uka from his marriage to Ferrazzini.