Houston, Texas, United States
I'm a geophysicist with a broad technology and Earth science background, currently working as a seismic processor. I can thrive in both the world of deadline-driven technical service work and the more exploratory world of research. In 2014 I completed a Ph.D. in earthquake physics, and in 2015 I had a brief stint as a research geoscientist a major oil company. I bring a researcher's outlook to my work--even routine production tasks. I like to look at complex problems, break them down into addressable portions, and reassemble the solutions into something meaningful. Put simply, I figure stuff out. And when handling routine work, I try to figure out ways to improve quality or efficiency in the tasks facing me. It is part of my overall aspiration always to leave things in better condition than I find them.
I joined DUG's Houston office, which provides seismic processing and imaging services to most of the major energy companies operating in North America. It continues to be a great opportunity to gain experience in a core area of exploration geoscience. At first I worked mostly on marine processing at various stages from time processing to depth imaging and velocity model building. As "the freshman," I performed a lot of quality control tasks and assisted preparing presentations for clients. With more experience, I developed new production workflows as well. Since spring 2017, I have worked almost exclusively on land seismic processing projects. Until recently, DUG's processing capabilities had been focused on marine projects, but advancing our land processing capabilities has become a top priority for the company. Even though I'm not in an R&D role, I've been able to use my programming and mathematical skills to accelerate that process by developing tools and workflows that address the complex noise and geometry issues in land seismic data.
After Chevron, I spent six months trying to find new opportunities in Houston to leverage my quantitative and analytical background. There's no doubt that the collapse of the oil industry made Houston a challenging place to launch a new career. During this time I worked hard to stay intellectually engaged. I remained active in my prior field of fault mechanics by advancing my own research and serving as a journal reviewer. I also worked on projects that enhance my computer programming skills, mostly in C++. One such project involved reverse-engineering a proprietary automotive databus and developing from scratch an embedded system that interfaces with it. And I worked hard at growing my professional network in what is still a fairly new city to me.
Well, that was short. I joined Chevron right out of graduate school. Long before I graduated, I realized that the obvious next step was to find a job in Houston because I knew my wife would likely end up working here (and she has). At the time, I knew I wanted to branch out from my prior subfield of geophysics, and a handful of companies were interested in hiring geoscientists from more than the usual petro programs. Chevron's plan for me was actually to build on my earthquake mechanics background by having me work on projects concerning induced seismicity, microseismicity, and integration of geomechanics and geophysical imaging. Unfortunately, oil's downward slide was already underway when I started work, and the visions of all the interesting work for me faded away as company priorities shifted. In that situation, I adapted well. I worked on a project coupling tectonics to petroleum system modeling, which led to some useful workflow changes for certain basin models. I also worked a little bit on a technology being developed for static reservoir modeling, hopefully smoothing its adoption by the users in the company. My coworkers were impressed with my ability to pick up petroleum geoscience quickly. Working at Chevron was a lot of fun and I learned a lot from some talented colleagues. It was disappointing when, after only about eight months, the company formally decided it would no longer need the role for which I was originally hired. At the same time, Chevron realized that it needed to unwind itself from a strategy of aggressive hiring of early-career scientists. It was no surprise that, a couple months later, my time there came to an end. Despite what happened, I am proud to have worked at Chevron. It was an incredible learning experience and it reinvigorated my desire to be a geoscientist. It was refreshing to be practising science as a part of an effort that had economic value to the world.
This was graduate school. My Ph.D. research was in theoretical fault mechanics. I coupled idealized models of friction, elasticity, and heat transport in a big numerical model and reported on what behavior the model produced. I got interested in this topic before I went to Stanford because I felt that friction was key to understanding the physics of earthquakes (I still think so) and understanding it was an effort that had significant intellectual merit. At some point I fancied the idea of becoming a professor and researching this topic for a lifetime. After a few years I realized I didn't want to pursue this topic for the rest of my life--and I also didn't want to be a professor. I pushed on and ultimately completed the Ph.D. It remains an open question whether that was wisest career move, but at least it removes any doubt that I can dive deep on a topic to become a subject matter expert. A Ph.D. is certainly learning experience on executing a long-term project--one that breaks new ground, has frightfully dramatic ups and downs, totally looses focus at times and needs to be re-framed, and ultimately comes together as a meaningful contribution.
I worked at PFS briefly between UW and Stanford. PFS tested various construction materials. In other words, clients contracted with PFS to break stuff in order to see how strong it is. My job there was mostly designing machines to break stuff. How cool is that?! Working at PFS was well suited to my expertise at the time. It leveraged much of the engineering mechanics knowledge that one picks up studying geomechanics, but I also got to use skills in electronics, programming, and machine shop operations. I also had some opportunities to work on new areas, such as clarifying the company's marketing plan for testing services.