David J Wald (born May 6, 1962) is a Seismologist with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) at the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) in Golden, Colorado. He is an Adjunct Professor in Geophysics at the Colorado School of Mines. and was recently the Editor-in-Chief of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute's (EERI) journal, Earthquake Spectra, from 2018-2022. Wald is involved in the research, development, and operations of real-time information systems at the USGS National Earthquake Information Center. He has developed and manages products such as ShakeMap, Did You Feel It?, the community-science system, and is responsible for developing other systems for post-earthquake response and pre-earthquake mitigation, such as ShakeCast and PAGER. Education and early career Wald received his Bachelor's in Geology and Physics from St. Lawrence University in 1984. He then completed his Master's in Geophysics from the University of Arizona in 1986. He worked in Pasadena, California, for Woodward-Clyde Consultants from 1986-1988 on seismic hazard assessments for the Diable Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. David went on to California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, CA, and was awarded his Ph.D. in Geophysics in 1993. Wald then began working at the USGS in Pasadena, CA, in 1993 as a National Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellow and stayed on there as a researcher. He and his wife, Lisa Wald, also at the USGS, later transferred to the Golden, CO USGS office to work at the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC). Research and products ShakeMap The goal of ShakeMap was to "go beyond magnitude and epicenter” to depict the variations in the distribution of shaking intensity. Here, “shaking intensity” is used informally, as in "How intense was the shaking?". ShakeMap is now an open-source software program employed to automatically produce a suite of maps and products that portray the geographical extent and severity of potentially damaging shaking following an earthquake. ShakeMap is routinely used to provide post-earthquake situational awareness for emergency management and response and for damage and loss estimation. ShakeMap is also the primary shaking hazard input for many other downstream USGS earthquake products, including ShakeCast’s assessments of critical facilities, PAGER’s societal losses, and estimates of ground failure. Did You Feel It? For DYFI, Wald leveraged the work of Lori Dengler and Jim Dewey following the Northridge earthquake. Their large volume of macroseismic phone surveys motivated them to create a “community decimal intensity” by assigning numerical values to individual questionnaire responses that