After 33 years with the US Geological Survey, the Cal-Tech Earthquake Lady is movin’ on. On March 30, 2016, Dr. Lucy Jones will retire. Well, not quite.
Today’s Los Angeles Times has a deservedly flattering story about her life including her personal and professional accomplishments. It’s headlined The Earthquake Lady is leaving her job — to shake up how you think about climate change. This is a story that every parent with a student in grade school or high school ought to read. Then have your daughters, sons, and grandchildren read it.
When we put up our OpenCdA post entitled We Love Lucy! on February 21, 2016, we didn’t know Dr. Jones was contemplating retirement. We’re thrilled and completely unsurprised that she’s taking on a new scientific challenge. Her philosophy of science is, “What good is scientific knowledge if people don’t use it?”
One of Dr. Jones’ biggest challenges was to get citizens and officials to take earthquake preparedness seriously. More broadly, her biggest challenge was to get officials to incorporate verified science into public policy formulation.
In her next career, Dr. Jones hopes to create a center that helps bridge the fault between science and public policy formation. We can’t think of a better person and a more qualified scientist to do it than Dr. Lucy Jones.
My first thought when I heard the headline news this morning was, Oh no, who could possibly replace her. I look forward to hearing of her new endeavor.
Comment by Susie Snedaker — March 18, 2016 @ 9:27 pm
Susie,
Follow this link to the People webpage of the Caltech Seismological Laboratory website. I’ll bet that somewhere in there is someone with the passion for science and the skill for simplification and explanation who will step up.
Dr. Jones was with USGS, and as far as I know, her counterpart on the Caltech Seismo side of the house, Dr. Kate “Earthquake Kate” Hutton is still there (though she may have retired by now, too). Like Dr. Jones, Dr. Hutton had the gift of being able to simplify and explain complex scientific material.
There are also some scientists up the 210 from Caltech at JPL who have that gift when it comes to explaining “rocket science”.
Comment by Bill — March 19, 2016 @ 5:39 am
Things won’t be the same, it is not an earthquake unless Lucy says so
Comment by Mike Teague — March 21, 2016 @ 9:09 am