He directed the Global Seismic Hazard Assessment Program of the UN/International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) and was a co-founder of the Global Earthquake Model initiative.

He co-authored over 220 publications in international peer-reviewed journals, with a focus on deep earthquakes, Earth free oscillations, structure of the Earth’s mantle and core, source inversion, waveform modeling in complex media, seismic hazard and risk assessment, microzonation, planetary seismology, induced seismicity, geoenergies. In the past 15 years, 60 PhD Theses were completed under his Professorship at ETH Zurich.