position	Director
email	morap@esscc.uq.edu.au
web	TBA
phone	(+ 61 7) 3346 4123
fax	(+ 61 7) 3346 4134
office	47a-805

Peter Mora is a Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at The University of Queensland, Director of the Earth System Science Computational Centre (ESSCC) and Executive Director of the APEC Cooperation for Earthquake Simulation (ACES). He was the founding CEO and is Science Committee Chair of the Australian Computational Earth Systems Simulator Major National Research Facility (ACcESS MNRF). His current research is on computational earthquake science and aims to develop an understanding of the physics of crustal fault systems in order to establish the scientific underpinning for earthquake forecasting.

Professor Mora obtained his B.Sc. (Hons) in Geophysics from Adelaide University in 1979. He then worked as an exploration geophysicist for ESSO Australia in Sydney and subsequently became a consultant to Delhi Petroleum in 1981 developing seismic modelling software. In 1982, he commenced postgraduate studies in geophysics at Stanford University where he obtained an M.Sc. in 1984 and Ph.D. in 1987 on nonlinear inversion of seismic data. In 1985, while on leave of absence from Stanford, he worked as a visiting research fellow at the Institut de Physique du Globe (IPG) in Paris, France. In 1987, he commenced as a research scientist at Thinking Machines Corporation in Cambridge, Massachussetts, developing massively parallel computer algorithms for seismic processing and modelling. In 1989, he joined the faculty of the Seismology Department at Institut de Physique du Globe where he established an industry sponsored consortium - The Seismic Simulation Project - to research the simulation of geophysical phenomena such as seismic waves, rock fracture and earthquakes. In 1992, he commenced developing the Lattice Solid Model to study the nonlinear physics of earthquakes. In 1993, he was promoted to Professor of Mathematical Geophysics at the IPG and became the Director of the French national centre for parallel computing in the earth sciences (CNCPST). Late in 1994, he returned to Australia to establish and direct QUAKES. In 1997, he established the APEC Cooperation for Earthquake Simulation (ACES) with scientists from Australia, China, Japan and USA and was voted in as Executive Director of ACES in 1998. In 2000 he established the Australian Solid Earth Simulator supercomputer facility and in 2002 he led a successful bid to establish the Australian Computational Earth Systems Simulator Major National Research Facility. He has over 180 publications in theoretical and computational geophysics, exploration seismology, earthquake science and computational solid earth systems science.