Vedran (Ved) Lekić

I am a Professor of Geological, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I serve as Director of Graduate Studies. I received my A.B. from Harvard University (2004), where I completed my undergraduate thesis with Adam Dziewonski, and my Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (2009) under Barbara Romanowicz, followed by postdoctoral training at Brown University with Karen Fischer.

My research is broad, spanning scientific targets from Earth’s inner core to the critical zone, and from the Martian interior to the icy moons of the outer solar system. On Earth, I have worked on lower mantle structure and large low-shear-velocity provinces, upper mantle tomography and tectonic regionalization, lithospheric structure and receiver functions, ice shelf seismicity, and near-surface characterization for humanitarian applications including landmine and unexploded ordnance detection. Beyond Earth, my work encompasses the crust, mantle, and core of Mars using InSight seismic data, lunar crustal structure, and the seismic exploration of planetary subsurfaces. Across all of these targets, I develop and apply Bayesian and transdimensional inverse methods, full-waveform modeling, cluster-based machine learning approaches, and multi-geophysics imaging techniques.

I am the recipient of a Packard Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, the Charles F. Richter Award from the Seismological Society of America, and the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize. My students and postdocs have gone on to careers in industry, government, and hold faculty positions worldwide.