Richard C. Aster is an American seismologist and is Professor of Geophysics [1] at Colorado State University.
In 1997, Aster founded the New Mexico Tech IRIS PASSCAL Instrument Center (now the EarthScope Primary Instrument Center), which supports seismological studies around the world under the management of the EarthScope Consortium[3] with primary funding from the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy, and served as the first Principal Investigator of the facility through 2013.
Aster, with Brian Borchers of New Mexico Tech and Clifford Thurber of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a co-author of an internationally used geophysics/mathematical textbook Parameter Estimation and Inverse Problems, which was published by Elsevier in a third edition in November, 2018.
In 2020, Aster began a three-year term as chair of the IRIS Consortium board of directors.
In 2024 and 2025 Aster was a Harry H. Hess Visiting Professor at Princeton University and a Gordon E. Moore Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology.