Richard A Denne

Richard Denne is Program Director of the Gulf Basin Depositional Synthesis Project (GBDS), an industry-supported research project at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) that assembles and synthesizes well, seismic, and other data to establish a basin-scale depositional history of the Gulf of Mexico. His research focuses on integrating biostratigraphic, geochemical, and lithostratigraphic data to understand Cretaceous depositional systems and on applying biostratigraphy to determine the paleoenvironments and relative ages of Cenozoic and Mesozoic marine systems. Richard holds a B.S. in Geology from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University. He began his career at Exxon in 1990 and served as Marathon Oil’s chief biostratigrapher, after which he left industry in 2016 for Texas Christian University where he held the Endowed Chair in Petroleum Geology and was Director of the TCU Energy Institute. He joined the University of Texas in March 2025.