Bob Busby's retirement from EarthScope

[Glen Mattioli]

EarthScope staff and community,

Bob Busby has announced his intention to retire from EarthScope on March 28th, 2025.  Bob has served in many capacities over his long and distinguished career, most recently taking on the role within the Instrumentation Services group at EarthScope of Global Networks Program Manager, which includes technical and financial program management of the NSF EAR portion of the Global Seismic Network as well as the NASA Global GNSS Network. 

Bob began his career in geophysics in graduate school at the University of Colorado Boulder Physics Department pursuing a MS under Dr. Judah Levine, joining Chuck Meertens in a borehole tiltmeter project in Yellowstone National Park from 1983-1987. The lab also experimented with GPS geodesy, unboxing a TI-4100 receiver when there were only four GPS satellites.  After receiving his MS, he decamped to Lamont Earth Observatory to work as a field engineer in the seismology group, first with Noel Barstow on an Earthquake Engineering project, then in 1989, after lengthy excursions on the Loma Prieta aftershock response, joining the PASSCAL Instrument Center based at Lamont.  Highlights include, unboxing a set of 12 new STS-2 broadband seismometers in 1990, and then deploying those across the Tibetan Plateau on a PASSCAL experiment and continuing, by train to Lake Baikal for another experiment.  In 1994, he left Lamont to form a consulting company based in Woods Hole, which assisted in PASSCAL deployments for IRIS, OBS deployments for USGS, WHOI, and commercial seismic network installations for Reftek, Kinemetrics and Quanterra. In 2003, the Earthscope MREFC was awarded, and in 2004 Jim Fowler recruited Bob to manage the USArray Transportable Array.  That project installed over 1800 seismic stations (and removed about 1400) across the coterminous US, Alaska, and Yukon, finally closing out in 2022.

Bob will be on PTO next week returning on March 17th for his last two weeks with EarthScope. I will be naming an Interim Global Network Program Manager soon to assist with the transition of Global Networks Program management and continuing smooth operations of the GSN and GGN.

I will miss Bob's frank counsel, deep technical knowledge of geophysical instrumentation, and long and adept administrative experience. Please join me in congratulating Bob on his decades of service to IRIS, EarthScope, and the geophysical community and wish him continued success in his next phase as a gentlemen farmer and land conservationist.

Regards,

Glen S. Mattioli, Ph.D.
VP Instrumentation
EarthScope Consortium, Inc.
1200 New York Avenue, NW Suite 454

Washington, DC 20005

202-682-2220

https://www.earthscope.org
glen.m...@earthscope.org