Editing Houston 2011 (section)

== Speaker biographies ==

* '''Renee Bourque''' is a Geoscientist at dGB Earth Sciences in Houston, TX. As part of the case studies team, she has interpreted basins around the world and contributed to the development of the HorizonCube and related applications. Her professional interests include educational outreach and helping others to see the geology behind the seismic reflections. Renee received her Bachelor’s in Geology from Texas A&M University, and her Master’s in Hydrogeophysics from the State University of New York at Buffalo. 
* '''Richard Clarke''' graduated from Cambridge, England with an engineering degree in 1993. He completed a PhD in geophysics at the Institut Francais de Petrole in 1997 and has spent the last 13 years in the technology group at BP processing seismic data with USP & DDS. He has written numerous modules in DDS.
* '''Joe Dellinger''' graduated from the Stanford Exploration Project in 1991. He is the author of much of the framework underlying vplot, the graphics system used in SEPlib and now Madagascar. Joe currently works in the seismic imaging team at BP in Houston.
* '''Sergey Fomel''' has been working at the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin since 2002 and currently has an Associate Professor appointment, jointly with the Department of Geological Sciences. He received a Ph.D. in Geophysics from Stanford University in 2001 and worked previously at the Institute of Geophysics in Novosibirsk, Russia, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Sergey started work on Madagascar (at that time named RSF for Regularly Sampled Format) in 2003.
* '''German Garabito''' received a Doctor degree in Geophysics from Federal University of Para (UFPA), Brazil, in 2002. He worked at UFPA-Brazil as Professor from 2002 to 2009 and currently work as Professor at UFRN-Brazil. He is responsible for the development of the BotoSeis Project for interactive seismic data processing with the Seismic Unix (SU) package.
* '''Dave Hale''' received a B.S. in physics from Texas A&M University in 1977 and a Ph.D. in geophysics from Stanford University in 1983. At Stanford, he studied with the Stanford Exploration Project. He has worked as a field seismologist and research geophysicist for Western Geophysical, as a senior research geophysicist for Chevron, as an associate professor at the Colorado School of Mines, as a chief geophysicist and software developer for Advance Geophysical, and as a senior research fellow for Landmark Graphics. While at Mines, he worked with the Center for Wave Phenomena. In 2005, he returned to Mines as the C.H. Green Professor of Exploration Geophysics.
* '''Matt Hall''' is a geoscientist based in Nova Scotia. A sedimentologist who found geophysics later in his career, Matt has worked at Statoil in Stavanger, Landmark and ConocoPhillips in Calgary, and is now happily self-employed - - running his company from his world HQ: A small shed conveniently located in his back garden. You can read Matt's blog of the workshop at http://www.agilegeoscience.com/journal/2011/6/16/open-seismic-processing-and-dolphins.html and http://www.agilegeoscience.com/journal/2011/6/18/more-powertools-and-a-gobsmacking.html
* '''Bill Menger''' - Houston HPC Manager for Weinman Geoscience: Bill holds BS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Geophysics from Texas A&M University. He was a nuclear engineer in the US Navy Submarine force for five years, joined Conoco R&D doing work in magnetotellurics, multi-component seismic, and development of a seismic processing system for the Cray X-MP. He moved to Houston with Conoco's Advance Exploration group, building a worldwide database of all its oil and gas data using a distributed database. After a stint in Lafayette as data management supervisor, he left Conoco to join Applied Geophysical Software, where he wrote software for multiple suppression, model-building, tomography, and depth migration. Bill rejoined Conoco in 1998 and assisted with the rewrite of CPS, the seismic processing system for Conoco. From the ConocoPhillips merger in 2002 until March 2009 he supervised a software and HPC group. At ConocoPhillips, Bill was instrumental in obtaining open source licensing for CPS (http://cpseis.org), and for GeoCraft (http://geocraft.org), a framework for general purpose geophysical software. Bill is President of the Society of HPC Professionals.
* '''Bjorn Olofsson''' received a MSc degree in geophysics from the University of Hamburg in 1997. Starting with Geco-Prakla in Stavanger/Norway as a data processor, he worked in seabed seismic data processing for 4 years, then moved into research & development for the following 4 years. In 2005 he joined Multiwave, a small marine seismic service provider based in Bergen/Norway which subsequently was acquired by CGG, as an onboard QC geophysicist. After working offshore for 1 1/2 years, he went back to the office as a research geophysicist and doing onboard processing support. He then had a short stint at Spectraseis doing passive seismic data processing, and has since then worked with Seabird Exploration in ocean bottom node seismic business.
* '''Alexander Mihai Popovici''' is Chief Executive Officer of Z-Terra, a state-of-the-art software, data processing and infrastructure provider.  He holds Ph.D. (1995) and M.Sc. (1991) degrees in geophysics from Stanford University, and a B.S. (1985) in geophysical and geological engineering from University of Bucharest, Romania.  He escaped from Romania in 1986, crossed two borders and spent a year in a refugee camp in Austria.  Popovici is the founder and former CEO of 3DGeo Inc.  The company was sold in 2008. Dr. Popovici's industry experience includes work in the seismic processing research department for Halliburton Geophysical Services in Dallas and Houston, and EM acquisition and processing for the University of Bucharest, Romania.  He has several patents, over 70 publications and has given numerous invited conference and workshop talks. He has been a member of the SEG Research Committee since 1995, served as Associate Editor (Seismic Migration) for Geophysics, and is a Chairman and founding board member of Geoscientists Without Borders. He was president of Casa Romana (http://www.casaromana.org), a non-profit organization serving Americans of Romanian origin living in the Bay Area.  He is Honorary Vice Consul of Romania in Houston.  Popovici is director of the Romanian Education Foundation (http://www.roed.org), which he co-founded in 1994, a charitable organization helping students from impoverished families to apply at American and European universities.  He is a scuba diving instructor, active fencer (ranked top ten in the veteran division of the US), plays paintball with one of the first established pro teams (The Wild Geese, founded 1985), practices karate, rock climbs, and is working on his private pilot license.  
* '''Karl Schleicher''' received a B.S. In Mathematics from the University of Houston in 1974 and an MS in Management from the University of Texas at Dallas n 1988.  He has worked in data processing, software testing, and research for GSI, Halliburton Geophysical, Western Geophysical, GDC, PGS and AGS.  He is interested in the practical development, implementation, and commercialization of seismic processing technology.  He is now retired and works part time as a Senior Research Fellow at University of Texas at Austin
* '''Ioan (Nick) Vlad''' received an Engineer degree in geophysics (2000) from the University of Bucharest and a M.Sc. degree in geophysics (2002) from Stanford University. After three more years of research at Stanford and an internship with ConocoPhillips, he joined Statoil. He did imaging and velocity analysis R&D for Statoil for five years -- four at the Trondheim Research Center, and one as a Visiting Scientist with Colorado School of Mines. He is currently a Senior Research Geophysicist with Fusion Petroleum, Inc. He is a member of the SEG, EAGE, IEEE Computer Society, FSF and the Linux Foundation. He has been a participant in the Madagascar project since 2006.
* '''Yang Zhang''' is now a graduate student in Stanford Exploration Project (SEP) at Stanford Univeristy. Besides doing research in exploration seismology, he is currently in charge of the reproducibility check on the SEP research reports.  Previously he earned a bachelor degreee of EE from Tsinghua University in P.R.China in 2007, he spent another year in Microsoft Research Beijing Lab working on projects related to Computer Graphics.