FOR TEACHING AND RESEARCH IN ELECTROMAGNETIC GEOPHYSICS
THE GWH CAREER ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
2021 Awardees
Paul Bedrosian
U.S. Geological Survey, Denver, Colorado USA
The GWH award honors the best and brightest electromagnetic (EM) researchers and Dr. Paul Bedrosian easily fits this category with an impressive breadth and depth of career achievements. He is the rare geophysicist with a deep understanding of electromagnetic methods and algorithms as well as a strong grasp of geology and tectonics which he links to bring meaningful new understanding of Earth systems across disparate scales and applications. Paul’s abilities do not end there, however, as he is also a highly skilled field geophysicist who understands instrumentation and field logistics like few others. Paul has a strong record of service and leadership in the geophysics community from educating a new generation of geophysicists, leading the international MT community and in USGS and AGU service. Without a doubt, Paul’s leadership in the use of MT and airborne electromagnetics, both within USGS and with the broader scientific community, has led to numerous important scientific and societal contributions around the globe. Paul has conducted this work with integrity, respect, and collaboration. The electromagnetic geophysics community is grateful to Paul’s family, friends, colleagues, and other supporters who have been and continue to be instrumental to his success.
--- Carol A. Finn
Max Moorkamp
Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, Germany
Geophysical methods are all individually very advanced and provide limited information about the Earth. The challenge is at the interfaces between those methods. There is only one Earth, and all of our geophysical data should be consistent with our model of it, whether at the local, regional or continental scale.
Max Moorkamp has brought his considerable numerical talents to this problem and has been developing and advancing formal Joint Inversion for almost two decades. Max’s initial work was on probabilistic inversion combining long period MT with seismic data (receiver functions and surface wave data), then he branched to crustal scale problems with linearized inversion integrating MT, seismic and gravity data. Most recently Max has been using Mutual Information to link disparate data together. Max not only develops numerical methods, he also acquires data and is adept at understanding data and dealing with it. He works at a very wide range of scales, from archeo-geophysics, to resource exploration (oil, geothermal, minerals), to earthquake fault and volcano imaging, to regional lithosphere surveys. Max makes his codes freely-available to the community, and is providing community service through editorship for the open pre-print platform ESSOAR (run by AGU), and for JGR Solid Earth. EM geophysics is stronger because Max Moorkamp is part of our community, and he is a very worthy recipient of the GWH award.
---Alan G. Jones
GWH Award History
- 1997, Misac Nabighian, lifetime achievement (The only geophysicist interviewed in the Society of Economic Geologist oral history program)
- 1998, David Alumbaugh, young scientist
- 1999, Douglas Oldenburg and Yaoguo Li, publication
- 2000, Stanley Ward, in support of the SEG Ewing Award
- 2001, Ulrich Schmucker, educator
- 2002, Kurt Sorensen and Max Meju, humanitarian
- 2003, Steven Constable and Gerald Minerbo, O&G exploration
- 2004, Yves Lamontagne, mineral exploration
- 2005, Nigel Edwards, numerical modeling
- 2006, Adele Manzella and Toshihiro Uchida, geothermal
- 2007, Art Raiche, lifetime achievement
- 2017, Frank Morrison and Arnold Orange, lifetime achievement
- 2019, Jana H. Börner and Lindsey J. Heagy, young scientists