After deciding to focus on mathematics, Byerly then received the offer of a job as a physics assistant at the University of California, Berkeley, where he spent his final year.
[7] In less than a week, severe earthquakes occurred in Montana and Santa Barbara, and Byerly had to manage the press relations for the station.
[2] Byerly was named assistant professor in 1927 at University of California, Berkeley, and he would remain on the faculty until 1965.
The following year he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study mathematical geophysics at Cambridge, England.
[9] During the International Geophysical Year (1957–1958), Byerly was named chair for the Panel on Seismology and Gravity.
[2] By the time of his retirement from Berkeley, the number of seismic stations managed by the university had increased from two to sixteen, including the first network to be monitored over a telephone line.
[2] During his career, Byerly researched topics in seismology including the structure of the Earth particularly near California, the focal mechanism of earthquakes, and the theory of the seismograph itself.
[3][15] He was able to establish a root existed under the southern Sierra Nevada mountain range that caused a delay in seismic waves passing through it.
[16] Byerly found a method of using the direction of the initial motion on a seismograph to compute the types of forces acting as the source of an earthquake.