Juliet Biggs

Juliet J. Biggs is a British geologist who is Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. Her research uses satellite geodesy and interferometric synthetic-aperture radar (InSAR) to understand the physics of the Earth's crust. She was awarded the American Geophysical Union John Wahr Award in 2017 and a European Research Council (ERC) consolidator grant in 2020.

Early life and education
Biggs has said that she liked science from a young age. Her parents were both academic mathematicians. She has said that she enjoyed visiting the Science Museum, London. Biggs studied earth sciences as specialism in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge. In her first year of university, she got a summer research internship and worked on a research mission with academics at the University of Southampton. She moved to the University of Oxford as a doctoral researcher, where she studied the earthquake cycle at the Denali Fault. During her doctoral research supervised by Barry Parsons and Tim J. Wright, Biggs used interferometric synthetic-aperture radar (InSAR) to determine strain around faults. This strategy has been adopted by InSAR researchers around the world.

Research and career
After her PhD and during her postdoctoral research, Biggs started working with satellite imagery to understand tectonic and volcanic regions. In 2010, Biggs joined the University of Bristol, where she was made a full professor in 2019. Her research investigates earthquakes and the earthquake cycle. She has studied dyke intrusions in the East African Rift and the development of new hazard assessments. Biggs has used satellite imagery to understand volcanoes all around the world, and has identified that several volcanoes previously considered dormant are in fact evolving rapidly. She proposed that this imaging approach could be used to forecast volcanoes that were at risk of eruption. She used imagery from the Sentinel-1 to understand deformation around Mount Agung. In 2020, she was awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant to image volcanoes using 'strain tomography'.

Awards and honours

 * 2012 Royal Astronomical Society Winton Award
 * 2016 British Geophysical Association Bullerwell Lecture
 * 2016 Lloyd's of London Science of Risk Prize
 * 2017 American Geophysical Union John Wahr Early Career Award
 * 2018 Philip Leverhulme Prize
 * 2022 European Research Council (ERC) consolidator project