I was born in Amagasaki, Hyōgo, on Friday, November 26th, 1982.

In 1995, when I was 12 years old, I experienced the Kobe earthquake, shortly before failing the entrance exam of a private junior high school. However, instead of making me decide to become a seismologist, it only taught me that earthquake prediction is impossible, and that one should not simply believe the seismologists on TV: the media and the government had been emphasising the potential danger of only the “Big One” in the Tokyo region, as if there were no danger elsewhere, while it is natural to have catastrophic earthquakes whenever and wherever in Japan. Looking back, this reaction may have been naive, but it shaped me.

Dreaming of the capital, I entered the University of Tokyo in 2001, where I stayed nine years in total. Most of the time, however, I found myself in the corridor of the students’ house or with the university orchestra, working on my bassoon playing under the supervision of Hitomi Sugawara, honorary member of the International Double Reed Society, who treated me like his son until his passing in February 2022.

I defended my thesis in 2010 on a new methodology to invert seismic waveforms for elastic and anelastic structure, under the supervision of Robert J. Geller at the University of Tokyo.

Right after my thesis, I left Japan, attracted by olive oil (and cassoulet), to work from 2010 to 2012 as a postdoc with Sébastien Chevrot at Université Toulouse III, optimising the computation of high-frequency waveform Fréchet derivatives (sensitivity kernels).

I was recruited as an associate professor at l’Institut de physique du globe de Paris in 2012. I was the pedagogic head of the international master’s programmes (GPX and IMSES) from 2012 to 2020, elected member (rank B) of the scientific council of IPGP from 2016 to 2019, member of the scientific council of the global network GEOSCOPE from 2016 to 2022, and head of the theme Earth’s and planetary interiors from 2016 to 2020.

I defended my habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) in 2022 and have been a junior member of l’Institut universitaire de France since 2022.

Since 2025, I have been the head of the seismology team at IPGP.

It looks like I will most probably stay in France for the rest of my life.

Parcours

Full CV

Curriculum Vitæ Personal details Name : Fuji, Nobuaki Date of birth : 26 November 1982 Nationality : Japanese (French naturalisation in progress) Place of birth : Hyōgo, Japan Current position : Associate professor (maître de conférences), Université Paris Cité Institut de physique du globe de Paris Junior member, Institut universitaire de France Professional address : Office 328, Seismology team Université Paris Cité Institut de physique du globe de Paris (CNRS) 1 rue Jussieu 75238 Paris Cedex 05

Publications et communications

Publications dans des revues à comité de lecture (rang A) (Les doctorants et postdoctorants encadrés sont indiqués par “supervision”. Les collaborations par “collaboration”.) 2026 Drique, L., Dalaison, M., Pinel-Puysségur, B., Fuji, N., 2026 (supervision) Observations of InSAR closure phase and coherence over crops in the Thessaloniki region, Greece. 16th European Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar (EUSAR 2026), 104–109. Goos, I.A., Fuji, N., Durand, S., Van Elewyck, V., Coelho, J.A.B., Mittelstaedt, E., Deniz, Y., 2026 (supervision) Sensitivity of neutrino oscillations to the Earth’s interior properties. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 696, 120354.