Rick Benson began working full time at the IRIS DMC in the summer of 1993, following 11 years as the lead analyst in the Seismology Lab at the University of Washington. He has been affiliated with IRIS since the early days of the DMC in the late 1980’s, when the DMC was transferred to Seattle from Austin, TX. Becoming Director of Operations in July 1994, Rick leads what is affectionately known as the ‘Engine Room’. The Operations group is responsible for archiving and distributing data through data requests. They currently oversee approximately 40,000 data requests and archive approximately 3 terabytes of data annually. Rick’s mission statement is to enable access to data. He works with a relatively small staff of 3 full time employees who have automated the bulk of the data handling and management by leveraging robotic technology and internet capacity.

For more information about how the Engine Room runs, view this related article.