Laura Valentina Socco

Laura Valentina Socco

MSc	Civil Engineering
PhD	Environmental Geoengineering
MSc university	Politecnico di Torino (Technical University of Turin)
PhD university	Politecnico di Torino

Laura Valentina Socco is an associate professor in Applied Geophysics and Head of the Geophysics Lab at Politecnico di Torino (Technical University of Turin), where she obtained her PhD in environmental geo-engineering (1997) and her MSc in civil engineering (1992). She has been in charge of the Applied Geophysics Lab at the Politecnico since 2007. Her research work covers several near-surface geophysical methods and applications, and, over the last decade, has focused on surface-wave methods and geophysical data integration for near-surface characterization, with particular regard to the development of new processing and inversion approaches. She is author of more than 110 peer-reviewed scientific publications in journals and for conferences and has been given an honorable mention for Best Paper in Geophysics in 2012. She is a member of the EAGE Research Committee and is vice-chair of the EAGE Near Surface Division Committee. She is Associate Editor of Geophysics (since 2003) and Near Surface Geophysics (since 2006). She has been the principal investigator of many research projects financed by national and international institutions as well as by private companies. She teaches geophysical prospecting in the Petroleum Engineering MSc Program. She has been advisor of more than 40 MSc and of 5 PhD theses. She has been convener of several workshops at EAGE conferences and an invited speaker at international conferences and research institutions.

Honors and Awards

• Honorable Mention in the category Best Paper in Geophysics -2016 Paolo Bergamo for their paper P- and S-wave velocity models of shallow dry sand formations from surface wave multimodal inversion

• Conrad Schlumberger Award 2014 (EAGE)

• 2013 SEG Near-Surface Global Lecturer.

• Honorable Mention in the category Best Paper in Geophysics -2012 with Paolo Bergamo and Daniele Boiero, for their paper Retrieving 2D structures from surface-wave data by means of space-varying spatial windowing.

• Honorable Mention in the category Best Paper in Geophysics -2011 Paolo Bergamo Margherita Maraschini, Daniele Boiero, and Sebastiano Foti, for their paper Scale properties of the seismic wavefield perspectives for full-waveform matching.

SEG 2019 Outstanding Educator Award

Laura Valentina Socco of Politecnico di Torino is an excellent teacher and mentor. She has an instructional style based on discovery and thought rather than simply asking students to remember what she presents in class. Her graduate students report that she treats them as colleagues rather than as subordinates. When she brings them with her to professional conferences, she introduces them to internationally prominent colleagues. She encourages them to publish their research and helps them find professional career opportunities when they finish their degrees.

Biography Citation of the 2019 SEG Outstanding Educator Award

by Sebastiano Foti

Laura Valentina Socco is a brilliant and successful educator with more than 20 years of experience at Politecnico di Torino, where she has taught the course in applied geophysics for the master’s program in Environmental and Land Engineering and later the course in geophysical prospecting for the master’s program in Petroleum and Mining Engineering. As an educator she has been consistently able to conjugate a strong background of consolidated knowledge with up-to-date and ground-breaking advancements brought in from her outstanding research activity. In this respect, her activity as an itinerant educator traveling the world as the Fall 2013 SEG Near Surface Global Lecturer must be mentioned. In that role, she delivered a stimulating and inspiring talk on the use of surface-wave analysis for near-surface characterization, a research topic on which her excellence is recognized worldwide.

Valentina has been a great mentor for her master’s and PhD students, always able to join a solid and rigorous scientific approach with the ability to create a friendly and constructive working environment for her students. Many of those students are nowadays enrolled in research institutions and in industry all around Europe.

Valentina is chair of the College of Environment and Land Engineering at Politecnico di Torino, which includes a bachelor’s and two master’s programs. She is also academic advisor of the SEG Student Chapter of Politecnico di Torino.

Valentina dedicates this award to the memory of her beloved father, Carlo, who also was an outstanding researcher and educator in the field of urban and environmental planning.

"L. V. Socco, 2016"

2013 SEG Honorary Near-Surface Global Lecturer

Surface wave analysis for near-surface characterization: Introduction, theme and variations

While seismologists have been using surface waves to image the Earth's crust since the ‘60s and geotechnical engineers developed surface-wave analysis methods to characterize the soil in the ‘80s, we have had to wait until the last decade to see surface-wave analysis becoming a standard method in seismic exploration. Nowadays, surface waves, which are traditionally considered noise in seismic gathers, have shown the potential of estimating the shear properties of the shallow subsurface. They are, hence, routinely used in many near-surface applications that range from seismic hazard studies to the building of weathering-layer velocity models for seismic reflection corrections.

Different kinds of surface waves can be gathered, according to the environment and the subsurface conditions: Rayleigh waves, from land surveys, Scholte waves, in marine environments, Love waves, when horizontally polarized sources and receivers are used, Lamb waves or P-guided waves, when very high-impedance contrasts are present. Regardless of the kind of waves, the most established analysis method is based on the inversion of the geometrical dispersion of surface waves. This approach, which exploits the relationship between the vertical distribution of the seismic properties in the subsurface and the phase velocity of different surface wave harmonics, only considers the kinematics of the propagation and is based on several simplified assumptions. I will examine the potentials and limitations of this approach and different technical solutions for acquisition, processing, and inversion in the context of different applications.

The most important assumptions that are usually made in surface-wave analysis are that the site is 1D and that the experimentally retrieved dispersion curve coincides with the surface-wave fundamental mode. Both assumptions are often violated and specific measures have to be taken to handle multimodal propagation in laterally varying environments. Several technical solutions have been proposed and I will discuss them to define the best practice for surface-wave analysis in complex geologic conditions. Recently, tomographic techniques, which are usually applied in seismology, have been adapted to active seismic data. Their potentials and requirements will be presented.

Additional Resource

A recording of the lecture is available.

Interview

Please tell us a little bit about yourself (e.g., education, work experience, and why you became a geophysicist, etc.). My Master's degree was in civil engineering at Politecnico di Torino (Turin University of Technology, Italy). I moved to geophysics for my PhD (Politecnico as well) and I worked on electro-osmosis. I was a postdoc for two years focusing on geophysical methods for civil engineering and after that I was appointed Assistant Professor in the same Department where I recently became Associate Professor. When I graduated in civil engineering I knew that the design of constructions was not my dream and I wanted to move to something more related to applied science, so, when a PhD was offered to me in geophysics I thought that was a very good occasion. The funny thing is that during my Bachelor's and Master's studies I tried to avoid all the subjects related to waves and vibrations and then they became my everyday life… never say never. [sic]

Would you like to mention anything about your personal attributes that helped you achieve the professional status you enjoy today? Was it self-belief, hard work, a mentor, or something else? I think it has been a mixture of hard work, dedication, curiosity and a bit of luck. When I started to work on surface waves, in 1998, it happened by chance. I met some colleagues from the geotechnical engineering research team at the university canteen and they were interested in surface waves as a geotechnical characterization tool, but had no field data, so we offered them to use our seismic equipment and we started a zero budget joint project with my colleague Sebastiano Foti (now associate professor of Geotechnical Engineering). At that time I did not know the novelty and the potentials of the method. That was the starting point, and soon we discovered there was a lot of research to perform in that field. The successful outcomes that came later were also possible thanks to some smart fellows and students who were attracted by a young research team with lots of enthusiasm.

Why did you choose this lecture topic? Why is it important? Surface waves have been used for decades in seismology, but only in the last decade they have become an established technique in near surface geophysical exploration. I started working on surface wave methods in applied geophysics when almost nobody was. So I have followed the tremendous development these techniques have undergone in the last 15 years. They have become standard methods, but are also somehow new with respect to other seismic techniques; hence they are not often taught in university courses and some education and divulgation initiatives on this subject are really important. Surface waves methods are a powerful tool to estimate S-wave velocity, which is a key parameter for many engineering problems ranging from seismic site response to geotechnical characterization. Recently several studies are pointing out also the possibility of retrieving reliable P-wave velocity models and this opens new possibilities, particularly related to near surface velocity models required in deep exploration processing. The idea of using the signal that is usually considered noise in the data to provide additional information is very attractive and represents an opportunity not only in engineering and environmental applications but also in oil and gas exploration.

Could you tell us in a few sentences what your course objectives are? The first objective is displaying the complexity of surface wave propagation and its consequences on the methodological aspects. The second objective is to show, also through several field cases, which are the limitations and the potentials of this exploration method at the actual state of the art. The third objective is to give an idea of how recent research is working to overcome these limitations.

Are there any more specific areas that you want to emphasize? I think that the challenges for research in surface wave analysis are at present the effective inclusion of higher and leaking modes of propagation of surface waves in the inversion process, and the capability to reliably recover 2D and 3D structures in spite of the 1D forward operator that is used in the inversion.

What do you hope people will have learned after they attend your lecture? How is it different from other lectures? Honorary lectures can be devoted to students or to professionals. In both cases I hope to show the possibilities offered by surface wave analysis for addressing several near surface problems. I don't think that a lecture can provide exhaustive knowledge, but I hope to stimulate curiosity toward this geophysical technique. Surface wave analysis represents a well-established technique already applied to countless successful cases; still there is a lot of work to be done because its potentials are not fully exploited. I hope to be able to convey this message to the audience.

You have quite a busy year ahead. Do you enjoy traveling? Will it be difficult to balance the tour with your work? Fortunately my teaching at Politecnico falls in the spring semester, otherwise it would have been impossible for me to make this tour. I like travelling a lot and this tour represents a fantastic occasion to meet colleagues and fellows all over the world and exchange knowledge and ideas. I am pretty sure I will learn more than I will teach. Of course it will be complicated to manage the travelling and the everyday work, but my university strongly supports me. The other difficult issue is handling family organization, but I am lucky and my family deeply sustains me and I hope they will be able to travel with me from time to time.

Would you share with us one or two of your most exciting successes? Every time we are able to switch on a light in the subsurface I feel a strong enthusiasm and sense of discovery. Some datasets have been particularly challenging, others particularly easy and gratifying and I have been so lucky to work on data acquired all over the world for completely different purposes, ranging from fault detection to marine sediment characterization or to dune exploration. I think that my major achievement has been contributing to make surface waves a standard exploration tool for near surface problems in engineering and in oil and gas exploration.

How about a couple of disappointments? The worst memory of my professional life goes back to the very beginning of my career, when I led a project aimed at identifying buried foundations in an abandoned area where new constructions were planned. We applied several near surface geophysical methods and we were pushed by the client to work in great hurry. Our interpretation was not deep enough and we missed a huge concrete foundation whose anomaly was masked by other shallow targets. I will never forget the telephone call of the client when they found it during the construction works. I came back on the data and the information was there: hidden but present and available. I lost the client but the whole team received a very important lesson: never get bored to look into your data because most of the times the information you search is there. I am pretty sure that also those young fellows who collaborated with me at that time and who are now well esteemed professionals in industry still remember that lesson. The other important lesson learned was that you should not allow the client to require the results in a time that does not allow for a thorough analysis of the data. Now I am very careful when I plan my work.

What advice would you give to geophysics students and professionals just starting out in the industry? Never be frightened by something new; try to do what you like, but never decide whether you like something or not without knowing it; trust your fresh ideas and be ready to express them, but never be arrogant.

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