Rie Nakata

Biography

Rie Nakata (Kamei), PhD, is a Research Scientist and Research Mentor at ICSI. She is also a Research Scientist in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her research focuses on forward modeling, imaging, and inversion using AI- and physics-based approaches in seismology. She is currently engaged in understanding earthquake processes and their hazards in the San Andreas Fault systems and in subduction zones and  subsurface monitoring associated with anthropogenic processes (e.g.,  geothermal applications).

Previously, Dr. Nakata was a research fellow at MIT (2019), the University of Oklahoma (2018), the University of Western Australia (2013-2018), and an Assistant Professor at the Earthquake Research Institute of the University of Tokyo (2019-2025). She obtained her PhD at the University of Western Ontario on the topic of seismic full waveform inversion.

Publications

Selected Honors & Awards

• 2024 Outstanding award in AI for seismology competition
• 2013 Best paper, Japan Association for Petroleum Technology, Japan
• 2010 Best presentation, 112th Meeting, Society of Exploration Geophysicists In Japan

Areas of Expertise

• Machine Learning (Supervised, Unsupervised, Reinforcement Learning)
• Deep Learning and Neural Networks
• Generative AI and Foundation Models
• AI for Climate Change, Energy, and Environmental Sustainability
• Image Processing, Recognition, and Enhancement
• Big Data Analytics, Pipelines, and Infrastructure
• Mathematical Optimization, Operations Research, and Decision Science
• Reproducibility, Replicability, and Benchmarking in Research

ICSI Activity