About the Speaker: Before joining Stanford in January 2014, Suckale held a position as Lecturer in Applied Mathematics and as a Ziff Environmental Fellow at Harvard. She has a PhD in Geophysics from MIT and a Master in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to joining graduate school, Suckale worked as a scientific consultant for different international organizations aiming to reduce the impact of natural and environmental disasters in vulnerable communities. This experience motivates her research aimed at reducing disaster risk by advancing our understanding of the physical processes that give rise to the dramatic nonlinearities expressed in extreme events. For many natural systems, these nonlinearities result from the dynamic interactions between solid, fluid and gas phases. Suckale improves our fundamental understanding and predictive capabilities of these complex multi-phase flows by developing original computational methods customized for the problem at hand. The phenomena she explores range from the microscopic to the planetary scale and space a wide variety of geophysics systems such as volcanoes, glaciers, tsunamis and magma oceans.