about

Hans-Peter Bunge serves as Chair of Geophysics at Munich's Ludwig Maximilians University since 2003. Prior to his Munich appointment he served five years on the Princeton faculty following a European Union postdoctoral year at the Institute de Physique du Globe in Paris. He completed his Berkeley PhD in 1996, the majority of which he spent at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where his graduate work on global mantle convection models was supported by the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and the Advanced Computing Laboratory. An elected member of the Academia Europaea, and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Bunge served as President of the Geodynamics Division of the European Union of Geosciences from 2007-2009.

Bunge's research interests lie in theoretical and observational geodynamics using high performance computing to tackle problems of Earth dynamics. His work has ranged from modeling mantle and core convection to lithosphere dynamics, and the application of mineral physics to relate seismic information quantitatively to geodynamic models. Recently, he analyzed rapid plate motion variations as a probe into plate boundary forces and paleo mantle flow. Bunge developed fluid dynamics inverse theory based on an adjoint approach as a means to assimilate observations into geodynamic models and to solve the initial condition problem in geodynamics.