Editing Yang Liu (section)

==Please tell us about yourself==
I grew up in Changchun city, northeast of China. The name of the city means “always spring season”, but it has obviously four different seasons in the real world. I received an M.S. (2003) and a Ph.D. (2006) degree in geophysics from Jilin University, the biggest university in China since 2000. A joke about Jilin University is that the beautiful Changchun city is located inside the university campus. The good thing is that the university has the complete disciplines, which helped me expand my research fields later. When I studied for my master degree, programming of geophysical methods became one of my interests. Until I graduated in 2006, I was writing a data processing system using C++. However, starting it from scratch was absolutely depressing. Fortunately, I survived through the toughest stage and finally completed a small system with interface for plotting and several processing modules. 

I arrived at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007 to work with Prof. Sergey Fomel for three years as a postdoc fellow. At that time, I started to witness the academic openness of China, which began to send lots of visiting scholars and students to the entire world. I enjoyed the academic atmosphere in Sergey’s group, especially the excellent environment for reproducible research. I absorbed knowledge of computational geophysics like a sponge and began to realize that “Science needs vocal skeptics, openness, and verification!”, which inspired me to work on revealing the mysteries of the Earth. The three years in Austin for me were the most important period for a change of attitude towards life and the formation of my scientific ideas.

In 2010, I came back to Jilin University, where the Nonstationary Geophysical Signal Analysis group (NGSA) was gradually established, and my research interests expanded to non-seismic methods and even tectonics. Meanwhile, I also devote part of my time to developing open-source codes and maintaining the Madagascar server. I believe that volunteers for different kinds of support keep the Madagascar software vital.