Scientific Computation and Industrial and Applied Mathematics Seminar: Dr James Thomas

Dr James Thomas (formerly at Shell)

A career in the Upstream Oil Industry as an Applied Mathematician

Description:

In this talk I will give an overview of my career as an applied mathematician in the Upstream Oil Industry. Following my PhD at Nottingham University in Theoretical Mechanics I first joined the Geomechanics group in Shell E&P Research in the Netherlands. There I worked in a small team developing a finite element program for solving complex problems in Structural Geology. Over the next 33 years my career developed in many unexpected and interesting directions until finally I became General Manager of Shell Geoscience Services in charge of a large organisation supporting Shell's proprietary Seismic Processing and Interpretation technology. Throughout most of my career, mathematics and computer technology played a key role in understanding and solving the problems that arose in each of my various assignments. I was fortunate to see the early stages of this computer revolution and follow the exponential growth in capabilities that now allows us to image the subsurface with increasing accuracy and detail. I will illustrate some of the latter part of this work with some interesting examples and highlight where mathematics still continues to play a critical role.