Leadership & impact

Brad founded the UW FiberLab as a collaborative research enterprise for distributed fiber sensing in geophysics and environmental science. The Lab brings together faculty, students, postdoctoral researchers, instrumentation, data systems, and collaborators across disciplines rather than treating sensing equipment as the property of a single project.

Externally funded science remains its core purpose, but shared equipment access has also developed into a sustained operation. Equipment leasing broadens access to specialized systems, supports research teams around the world, and helps maintain capability between individual grants.

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Brad is organizing the Seismological Society of America’s 2026 special-topics meeting, Optical Seismology and the Next Era of Seismic Sensing, bringing together researchers from Europe, Asia, Oceania, and North America. He previously served as Cryosphere Section Lead for the Distributed Acoustic Sensing Research Coordination Network.

In 2018, he founded the Environmental Seismology session at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting and has helped sustain it as a venue for glacier seismology and related environmental work. He has also contributed through invited federal and national-laboratory advisory panels, international conference leadership, and colloquia in several countries.

Fiber sensing depends on close collaboration with cable owners, instrument developers, telecommunications companies, and applied research organizations. Brad contributed to the USGS Powell Center effort that led to laboratory testing of DAS interrogators and has participated in work spanning offshore-energy monitoring, SMART cables, the Internet-S project, and the US Ice Drilling Program.

To make the technology legible outside specialist circles, he developed the open guide Fiber Sensing for Fiber Owners, which has also been translated into Spanish to support projects in South America. A joint appointment at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory connects the group’s methods to national-security monitoring.

Brad also co-founded Applied Environmental Intelligence with former student Stephanie Olinger and collaborator Marine Denolle. The UW startup, advised by CoMotion and rooted in intellectual property developed through the research group, translates fiber sensing and physics-informed analysis into continuous subsurface intelligence.

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The group’s work is supported through sole-investigator and collaborative awards from federal, philanthropic, university, and industry partners. Philanthropic projects include a lead-investigator award from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust for UW photonic-sensing infrastructure and a Paul G. Allen Family Foundation collaboration on acoustic monitoring of marine mammals.

Partnerships also extend to the Paros Geohazard Initiative and the University of Sheffield. A UW Global Innovation Fund award supports a joint UW–Sheffield workshop in September 2026 designed to seed interdisciplinary research and long-term collaboration.

Within UW Earth and Space Sciences, Brad has served repeatedly on graduate admissions and introduced a structured applicant-review rubric to support more consistent and equitable decisions. He has also served on the Computing and Executive Committees and contributed to improving office space for postdoctoral scholars.

These activities complement the group’s approach to mentorship: clear expectations, early conversations about authorship and credit, reproducible work, regular feedback, and support for careers inside and beyond academia.