Juliet Biggs

Biggs has said that she liked science from a young age.[4] Her parents were both academic mathematicians.[4] She has said that she enjoyed visiting the Science Museum, London.[4] Biggs studied earth sciences as specialism in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge. In her first year of university, she got a summer research internship and worked on a research mission with academics at the University of Southampton.[4] She moved to the University of Oxford as a doctoral researcher, where she studied the earthquake cycle in the Denali Fault.[1] During her doctoral research supervised by Barry Parsons and Tim J. Wright, Biggs used interferometric synthetic-aperture radar (InSAR) to determine strain around faults.[1][5] This strategy has been adopted by InSAR researchers around the world.

After her PhD and during her postdoctoral research, Biggs started working with satellite imagery to understand tectonic and volcanic regions.[5][6] In 2010, Biggs joined the University of Bristol, where she was made a full professor in 2019. Her research investigates earthquakes and the earthquake cycle. She has studied dyke intrusions in the East African Rift and the development of new hazard assessments. Biggs has used satellite imagery to understand volcanoes all around the world, and identified that several volcanoes previously considered dormant are in fact evolving rapidly.[5][7] She proposed that this imaging approach could be used to forecast volcanoes that were at risk of eruption.[8] She used imagery from the Sentinel-1 to understand deformation around Mount Agung.[9] In 2020, she was awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant to image volcanoes using 'strain tomography'.[10]