Jeffrey Freymueller
- Endowed Chair for Geology of the Solid Earth
- Established through gifts honoring a faculty member in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
- Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
Bio
Jeffrey Freymueller, an Endowed Chair for Geology of the Solid Earth in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, is an internationally recognized leader in the field of geodesy and geophysics. His extensive research, utilizing satellites from the Global Positioning System to make highly precise measurements of movement on Earth’s surface, has led to discoveries in a wide range of topics including plate tectonics and plate boundary zones; faults dynamics; the continuing rebound of Earth’s surface from melting ice-age glaciers; and the inflation and deflation of volcanoes.
Freymueller received his B.S. in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in geophysics from the University of South Carolina. After his graduate studies, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Stanford and joined the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, as an assistant professor in 1995, with appointments at both the Geophysical Institute and the Department of Geological Sciences. He remained at Fairbanks until joining MSU in 2018. Freymueller is also the director of the EarthScope National Office, an NSF-funded program to study the structure and evolution of North America.
In addition to his research, Freymueller is well known for carrying out extensive and successful leadership service in numerous community-scale organizations, including UNAVCO, Inc., Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, and the American Geophysical Union, to name a few. Freymueller was an associate editor for the Journal of Geophysical Researchand the Journal of Geodesy, and editor-in-chief for the International Association of Geodesy Symposia Series.