image: Lisa Wald
Credit: Courtesy of Lisa Wald
For her groundbreaking work in creating the earthquake information “hub” of the Earthquake Hazards Program, of the U.S. Geological Survey, the Seismological Society of America honors Lisa Wald with the 2026 Frank Press Public Service Award.
Wald began work at the USGS in 1987 in Pasadena, California, as a geophysicist and outreach director before becoming science communications and web content manager at the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado, in 2002. She retired from the USGS in 2024.
“In the United States, the U.S. Geological Survey makes a wealth of earthquake information available, both educational resources and real-time products, in a variety of forms and through a variety of channels—including internet, text, and email—serving everyone from the general public to seismologists to governments to the media. Today we take that kind of information access for granted,” said USGS research geophysicist Sarah Minson, who nominated Wald for the award.
Minson noted that Wald worked with various USGS earthquake offices to pull together all the disparate USGS earthquake information into a single internet location, creating or facilitating the creation of most of the subsequent content on the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program website.
Wald taught herself HTML in the 1990s to build earthquake.usgs.gov, ushering in the internet era for the Survey. She was a key architect of the Earthquake Notification Service (ENS), which today allows users to receive custom automated earthquake event alerts, PAGER notifications about earthquake damage and fatality estimates, aftershock forecasts and more.
In 2015, Wald helped to produce the first U.S. Federal Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Tool Kit to aid federal agencies in carrying out citizen science and crowdsourcing projects. She was invited by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to be the web designer on the tool kit team.
During her time at USGS, Wald created a wide range of digital products for students, educators and the public, including Earthquakes for Kids, The Science of Earthquakes and the Science for Everyone series. Wald was also on the receiving end of all email inquiries sent to eq_questions@usgs.gov for almost two decades. She answered every one of what amounted to around 1000 emails every year. In their commendations of Wald, her colleagues noted her service in providing communications tutorials and advice for generations of scientists in and out of the federal government.
The Frank Press Public Service Award honors outstanding contributions to the advancement of public safety or public information relating to seismology. This award may be given to any individual, combination of individuals, or organization.