John Emilio Vidale (Papanice (KR) Italia born March 15, 1959) is an American-born seismologist who specializes in examining seismograms to explore features within the Earth.
Vidale was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA on March 15, 1959, studied physics and geology, and obtained his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1987.
He then held research positions at UC Santa Cruz and the USGS, until he joined UCLA in 1995.
In 2006, he moved to Seattle to direct the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network at the University of Washington.
[9] Vidale also contributed an improved method of ray tracing which relied on a finite-difference approximation of the eikonal equation and which has been used widely in both earthquake and reflection seismology.