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, for lifetime achievement in the field of electrical methods and potential theory (Misac is the only geophysicist to be interviewed by the Society of Economic Geologists for its oral history program).

• 1998: David Alumbaugh,  for an outstanding young scientist working in electrical geophysics

• 1999: Douglas Oldenburg and Yaoguo Li, for outstanding recent publications in the field of electrical geophysics

• 2000: Stanley Ward, in support of the SEG Ewing Award

• 2001: Ulrich Schmucker, for being an outstanding educator

• 2002: Kurt Sorensen and Max Meju, for outstanding work in humanitarian applications of electrical geophysics

• 2003: Steven Constable and Gerald Minerbo, for innovations in electrical methods of petroleum exploration

• 2004: Yves Lamontagne, for development of novel methods of mineral exploration by electrical methods

• 2005: Nigel Edwards, for lifetime achievement in modeling of electrical methods in geophysics

• 2006: Adele Manzella and Toshihiro Uchida, for applications of electrical methods in geothermal exploration

• ​​2007: Art Raiche, for lifetime achievement in mineral exploration by electrical methods

• 2017: Frank Morrison and Arnold Orange, for lifetime achievement in applications of electrical methods in diverse settings

• 2019: Jana H. Börner and Lindsey J. Heagy, for outstanding young scientists working in electrical geophysics