Jérôme Vergne becomes the new Director of the OVSM-IPGP
Committed to the various aspects of observing and monitoring telluric phenomena, Jérôme Vergne joined the IPGP on 1 July 2024 as Director of the Volcanological and Seismological Observatory of Martinique (OVSM-IPGP).
Publication date: 09/07/2024
Institute Life, Observatories, Press
Related observatories : Volcanological and Seismological Observatory of Martinique (OVSM-IPGP)
Jérôme Vergne obtained an engineering degree from the Ecole et Observatoire des Sciences de la Terre (EOST) in 1998, and then continued with a PhD at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Strasbourg (now part of the Institut Terre et Environnement de Strasbourg – ITES) on lithospheric imaging of the north-eastern edge of Tibet using various passive seismological imaging methods (time-of-arrival tomography, receiver functions, etc.). He then applied these approaches to the Hi-Climb experiment, a dense profile of seismological stations crossing the Himalayas and southern Tibet, as part of a post-doctoral stay at Oregon State University (USA).
In 2003, he joined the Laboratoire de Géologie of the École normale supérieure (ENS) as a lecturer, where he took part in a number of seismological imaging projects and, with a number of colleagues, developed an approach for monitoring solid transport in rivers based on the seismic noise it generates.
He returned to the Institut de Physique du Globe de Strasbourg in 2007 as assistant physicist to manage the Permanent Broadband Network (RLBP), a new national seismological observation service. The development of the RLBP quickly became one of the flagship projects of the Résif (French seismological and geodetic network) research infrastructure, of which he is one of the instigators. In the space of around fifteen years, thanks to funding from the Equipex Résif-Core and the involvement of more than fifty collaborators in six observatories for the sciences of the universe, two major research and higher education establishments (IPGP, OCA) and the CEA-LDG, the RLBP grew from 20 to 200 stations across France.
At the same time, Jérôme is developing research activities focusing in particular on the imaging and seismological monitoring of deep geothermal reservoirs. In 2017, after joining the physicists’ corps of the National Council of Astronomers and Physicists (CNAP), he became Deputy Director of the EOST in charge of observatories, a position he will hold until June 2024.
