Professor John-Michael Kendall FRS

Mike Kendall is a seismologist whose work has taken him to the hottest and coldest places on Earth, conducting experiments in places like Ethiopia and the Antarctic. He has studied the Earth from its core to its surface, including work on plate tectonics, volcanoes and ice sheets. He is also interested in the role of Geophysics in the world’s energy demands. Mike is the Chair of Geophysics at the University of Oxford.

Mike was previously the BGS Professor of Geophysics at the University of Bristol, where he founded the Bristol University Microseismicity Projects (BUMPS), an industry-sponsored research consortium. He has a PhD from Queen’s University in Canada and was postdoctoral researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the USA. He has held faculty positions at the University of Toronto and the University of Leeds, and was previously president of the British Geophysical Association and vice-president (Geophysics) of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 2011 he was elected fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

Professional position

  • Chair of Geophysics, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford

Subject groups

  • Earth and environmental sciences

    Geology, Geophysics, Seismology