Joe Steim

In the 1980’s, Dr. Steim and colleague Prof. Erhard Wielandt developed the first commercial 24-bit digitizer for global seismological applications, and created the technique of digital very-broad-band seismometry, now the defacto global standard. In 1987 he founded Quanterra, the leading company world-wide in digital broadband instrumentation technology for global seismological research. Much of the world’s digital data for global seismological research is recorded using the eponymous Steim data compression. Dr. Steim oversees strategic product development among the divisions of Kinemetrics. Kinemetrics acquired Quanterra in 1999. He received AB, AM and PhD degrees from Harvard University.