The QRN Team

The QuakeRecNankai team includes collaborators from Ghent University, the Geological Survey of Belgium (Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences), the University of Liège, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan (AIST), the University of Tokyo and the University of Cologne. 


Marc De Batist is a full professor in marine and sedimentary geology at Ghent University, Belgium. He has been working on lake sediments, worldwide, since 1991. During the past 10 years he focussed on developing methods to use sediments from modern lakes as quantitative paleoseismographs and to reconstruct earthquake recurrence patterns in different types of settings. Recent projects were in Chile and in Alaska. He is coordinator of the QRN project and will work on the records of Lake Hamana and the Fuji Five Lakes.



Evelien Boes is Ph.D. student at the Renard Centre of Marine Geology (RCMG, Ghent University, Belgium), employed on the QRN project. She is primarily interested in the imprint of past earthquakes and tsunami in lacustrine archives along the Nankai Trough. For her Master’s thesis she had the opportunity to gain experience with lake records by studying annually laminated sediments from Southern Alaska in view of a paleoclimate reconstruction.





Helmut Brückner is a full professor in Physical Geography at the University of Cologne (Köln), Germany. He has been working in coastal areas worldwide, with special interests in coastal geomorphology, geochronology, and geoarchaeology. During the past 10 years he and his team have been tracing the sedimentary footprints of extreme wave events in coastal geoarchives. Dating tsunamites and tempestites, among others with luminescence dating techniques, is one focus of this research.




Osamu Fujiwara, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Japan











Ed Garrett is a researcher based at the Geological Survey of Belgium, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. His background is in using microfossils to investigate past environmental change, with a particular focus on quantifying relative sea-level change in tectonically active areas. Ed has previously worked on paleoseismology projects in Alaska and Chile. For the QRN project he will mainly be focusing on the onshore record of earthquakes and tsunamis around Lake Hamana.




Vanessa Heyvaert is a senior researcher and project leader of the QRN project for the Geological Survey of Belgium, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. She is a sedimentologist with expertise in the Holocene palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of coastal and fluvial plains. As a JSPS postdoctoral fellow, her research focused on paleotsunami around Hamana lake in the past. During the last 10 years she obtained field experience in the Middle East, Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean and NW Europe.





Aurélia Hubert-Ferrari has been a professor in Geomorphology at the University of Liège in Belgium since 2009. Her research focuses on active tectonics working particularly on determining fault slip rate, fault interaction, earthquake recurrence time, deformation processes over longer spatial and temporal scales. She has a multidisciplinary approach combining geomorphology, paleoseismology in terrestrial, marine and lacustrine setting, structural geology, paleomagnetism, seismology, sedimentology, archeology and modelling. During the last ten years, she has focused on subaqueous paleseismology, working in Turkey, in Greece and presently in Japan.


Laura Lamair is a PhD student in paleoseismology working on Fuji lakes in the QRN project. Before starting her PhD, she studied seismic hazard assessment, earthquakes and landslides in Central Asia. She was also involved in the "SismAntioch" project where she analyzed the effect of earthquake on Roman aqueduct design.







Atsunori Nakamura is a post-doctoral fellow at the Subduction Zone Paleoearthquake Research Group, Geological Survey of Japan, AIST. He has worked on various topics including geochemistry, geomorphology, and paleoclimatology, with a particular interest on earth surface processes in the mid-latitude humid regions. He specialises in applications of in situ terrestrial cosmogenic nuclides. For the QRN project, he will work as an inorganic geochemist to reveal records of earthquakes, sediment provenance, and tectonics.



Stephen Obrochta, Akita University






Svenja Riedesel is a Masters student at the Institute for Geography (University of Cologne). During fieldwork in Georgia and Spain she collected experience on research in palaeogeography and soil science. Her B.Sc. thesis dealt with mineralogical and granulometrical parameters to reconstruct the transport and sedimentation processes along a coastal area of western Georgia. Within the QRN project she will write her Master thesis on a topic related to coastal hazards.




Koen De Rycker has worked since 1998 for the Renard Center of Marine Geology / Ghent University as a Geophysical Engineer, with acoustical equipment (high-resolution seismics, side-scan-sonar, multibeam), and a coring platform (Uwitec).








Yoshiki Sato is a research fellow belonging to the Quaternary Geology Research Group in the Geological Survey of Japan, AIST. He studies mainly on paleogeography and paleolimnology during the middle to late Holocene in the Lake Hamana and the Hamamatsu Strand Plain by using diatom fossil analysis. He had performed coring survey in alluvial lowlands around the Lake Hamana since 2008. He will join mainly coring survey in coastal alluvial lowlands around the Lake Hamana for the QRN project.



Martin Seeliger is a PhD student at the Institute of Geography, University of Cologne. His primary research interests are in paleogeography and geoarchaeology. His PhD thesis deals with the landscape evolution of the Bay of Elaia, which hosted the harbour of ancient Pergamum (W-Turkey). In addition he is studying the harbours of ancient Ainos (NW-Turkey). For the QRN project he is going to support Helmut Brückner and Svenja Riedesel during fieldwork.




Masanobu Shishikura is a leader of the Subduction Zone Paleoearthquake Research Group in the Geological Survey of Japan, AIST. He mainly studies coastal paleoseismology using various evidence such as tsunami deposit, marine terrace and historical documents, and is particularly good at tectonic geomorphology. He will contribute to the QRN project as an expert of active tectonics in all survey sites.







Rindai Tsunekawa is a masters course student at the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, the University of Tokyo. His research is the reconstruction of the geomagnetic intensity variation using cosmogenic nuclides in the Antarctic ice core. For the QRN project he joins the field survey in the Fuji lakes.







Jan Walstra is researcher at the Geological Survey of Belgium, Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. He is specialised in applications of remote sensing and GIS, in particular for mapping and quantifying geomorphological processes. Past research has focussed on landslides, fluvial systems and human impact, with extensive field experience in NW Europe, the Mediterranean and the Near East.






Shinya Yamamoto is a researcher at the Mount Fuji Research Institute. He studies on organic geochemistry of the Fuji Five Lake sediments to reconstruct past environmental changes. He is also interested in water chemistry of the Fuji Five Lakes and joins the field survey on the Fuji Five Lakes for the QRN project.







Yusuke Yokoyama is a full professor at the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, the University of Tokyo. He has been working on various topics relating on climate and environmental changes in the past to better understand the mechanisms mainly using geochemical techniques. Samples that have been used for his study extend from corals to Antarctic ice. He has been involving various international studies including IODP that he lead the international science team as a co-chief scientist. 





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