Our speaker, Lara Wagner received her Ph.D. in geophysics from the University of Arizona in 2005. Her research uses seismology to study the formation and evolution of the continental lithosphere. Unlike oceanic crust which is seldom over 200 million years old, continental crust records a history of up to billions of years of plate tectonic activity. Much of this history lies buried or has been overprinted by later events. Seismology cannot look back in time, but it has the unique ability to look deep into the Earth to investigate structures that are either being developed by modern tectonic processes today or that played a role in shaping the continents in the past.