STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

Candidates name: Juan Santiago Velasquez All my life I have wondered about how everything in the universe works. I have wanted to understand all the physical laws that govern our world. In particular, I have always wanted to understand our planet, the interior of the Earth and the behavior of climate, tides, earthquakes and all kind of planet phenomena. If you comprehend how nature behaves, you can be a determinant and useful person for society, for example helping in prevention of natural disasters or by exploring the earth in the search of different resources. This is why I want to be a geophysicist. But before studying geophysics, I chose to study physics because I think is one of the most important sciences you should learn if you want to understand more deeply how our planet works, and with it you obtain excellent mathematical and analytical skills. By 2007 after I finished high school, I was awarded with Bachilleres por Colombia scholarship due to my academic merits. So I started to study physics in Universidad de los Andes. There, I met Professor Germn Prieto, with whom I took the classes of Introduction to Geophysics and Seismology and I discover a new sort of topics in the field for me. I was especially interested in seismic tomography and how waveform inversion leads us to understand the Earths layers, to understand how the underground structure of our planet is. This is the topic in which I would like to work. At university I also took some intermediate laboratory classes and joined the Astronomy and Astrophysics university group, which led me to improve my teamwork and data processing and analyzing skills. Since I finished my studies and under the supervision of Professor Prieto, I have been working for about six months as a research assistant in a project analyzing seismic data from Colombian National Seismological Network,

performing picking of P and S waves of large global earthquakes, estimating the changes in the speed of the medium in 2D from those waves, and in earthquakes localization. With this experience I have acquired knowledge on management of seismic analysis software such as Antelope and iaspei-tau. I have also been working as a one-to-one teacher of high school and university students in math and physics. This way, I am constantly reviewing theory and practicing other of my passions: teaching science. The final stage in my academic life is to make a Ph.D., but for now, the next step is to obtain a Master degree in geophysics, doing my research on industrial applications of seismic tomography and seismic inversion. I want to study at Ludwig Maximilians Universitt because I am sure is one of the best European universities in Geosciences and it has excellent facilities and computational tools for research in geophysics. Moreover, there are some people in the university working in these topics, such as Professor Alan Schiemenz in applied and inversion geophysics problems, and Professorin Karin Sigloch in tomography. Finally, I know the main focus of seismology group of LMU is in computational seismology rather than in its applications, and this is the main reason why I would like to join LMU: The most perfect theoretical and simulated models you have, the better applications from theory you will have. Thus, I will be closer to achieve my final goal and become a geophysicist.