Sen Receive SEG’s Virgil Kauffman Gold Medal

December 5, 2018

Mrinal K. Sen, interim director of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, professor and Jackson Chair in Applied Seismology, was awarded the Virgil Kauffman Gold Medal from the Society of Exploration
Geophysicists (SEG) at their annual meeting in October.

The award is presented to a person who has made an outstanding contribution to the advancement of the science of geophysical exploration in the past five years.

“It is a pleasant surprise and quite an honor,” said Sen, who was nominated by his peers for his work in seismic wave propagation.

Over the past five years, Sen and his students focused on developing methods for building starting models for use in full wave form inversion and uncertainty quantification, and the modeling of seismic wave propagation in fractured media. These models have applications in oil and gas exploration and production.

“There were some limitations in the existing methods,” said Sen. “In earlier methods it was difficult to put discrete fractured networks in, so there was a serious computational bottleneck.” The new models developed by Sen’s group use more specific information instead of average properties, resulting in a more detailed picture of the reservoirs.