Seismologist Lucy Jones, who was the face of earthquake science and safety in Southern California for a long time, will shortly retire from the US Geological Survey.

On Friday, in a Twitter post, Jones shared that though she is leaving federal service but will stay there at the California Institute of Technology, where she is serving as a research associate.

Since long, it was Jones to whom the public looked up to at the time of earth shakes. She was always there in front of news cameras at the Caltech seismology lab, explaining magnitudes, errors and other information.

While speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Jones said, “When I give it a name, I give it a number, I give it a fault, it puts it back into a box and makes it less frightening. You feel better if somebody shows they understand what's going on”.

Presently, she is serving as the USGS science adviser for risk reduction, and while in this field she has also been often seen in outreach efforts aimed at enhancing public readiness for quakes, which includes everything from crawling underneath tables at the time of drills to giving advice to government leaders regarding policy matters.

This includes her recent work with the city of Los Angeles to tackle the main vulnerabilities that could result in catastrophic economic collapse in a seismic disaster event.

Born in Santa Monica, 61-year-old Jones received a doctorate in geophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981. Prior to that in 1976, she got a bachelor’s degree in Chinese language and literature at Brown University. She and her partner, Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson have two sons.