I am Foivos Karakostas, a Research IT Engineer at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP), providing operational IT and scientific support to the Planetology & Space Sciences and Geodesy teams. I work at the interface between infrastructure and research, supporting people and lab workflows while helping maintain the technical backbone of data-intensive science: reliable computing environments, networks and services, storage and backups, automation, and reproducible software setups.

Before moving into this role, I worked as a seismologist across a range of methods and settings. I obtained my PhD at IPGP in 2018, focusing on the inversion of meteor airbursts and impacts as seismic sources using Rayleigh-wave modelling. I then characterised seismic scattering in the shallow Martian lithosphere through S-coda analysis and, through my long involvement in NASA’s InSight mission to Mars, contributed to instrumentation-related activities, landing-site soil mechanics, and processing of the first seismic dataset acquired from another planet. More recently, I applied computational inversion and modelling to study mantle structure and anisotropy, and my latest research project explored the seismic signature of Newtonian noise in the context of the Einstein Telescope.