Vedran (Ved) Lekić

At the broadest level, I seek to understand the state, dynamics, and dominant processes of the solid Earth, as well as the interiors of other planets and satellites. Geophysical methods allow us to probe the inaccessible depths of planetary interiors.

On Earth, high-quality data from long-term broadband seismic installations and dense seismic arrays provide immense, information-rich datasets. On Mars, data from the InSight VBB seismometer has revealed tantalizing signals helping us to constrain the red planet’s crustal, mantle, and core structure. In both situations, flexible inversion techniques and sophisticated time-series analysis approaches — increasingly leveraging machine learning to identify trends and anomalies — provide crucial insights.

Additionally, new techniques and computational resources enable us quantify uncertainty in a way that has not been possible before. What’s more, we now have the theoretical, computational, and observational capabilities necessary to constrain sub-surface structure simultaneously using multiple geophysical approaches, and to do so in a self-consistent fashion. This makes multi-geophysics investigations of near-surface structure on and off Earth particularly exciting for me. Emerging technologies, such as drone-based multi-geophysics approaches, can help us not only to address important scientific questions but also respond to environmental challenges. Therefore, my efforts primarily focus on:

1. Developing and applying new techniques for imaging sub-surface structures, including full waveform modeling and self-parameterizing inversions of gravity and magnetic data;
2. Describing and quantifying the relationship between deep processes and structures and surface tectonics on global and regional scales;
3. Leveraging sophisticated analysis approaches to identify trends, anomalies, and signals that can lead to key discoveries;
4. Tackling challenges of drone-based multi-geophysics measurements for characterizing small-scale structures relevant in, for example, landmine and unexploded ordnance detection.

I hope you will take a moment to explore this website. I try to make sure that the research section remains updated, so that is the best place to start if you are interested in learning more about my research. You can download my up-to-date CV: Lekic_UMD_CV_Jan_2023