Kusch Lecture to Study Imaging of Resources

The annual Polykarp Kusch Lecture Series resumes at UT Dallas on Wednesday, April 23, with a talk by geophysical researcher George McMechan.

McMechan, an Ida M. Green Professor in the University’s School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, will discuss “3-D Imaging of Earth’s Energy Resources.” His talk — the 24th of the lecture series — will begin at 11 a.m. in the School of Management Building’s Davidson Auditorium (SOM 1.118).

McMechan is director of both the University’s Center for Lithospheric Studies and the Geophysical Consortium, which is an industrial affiliates program. He has 36 years’ experience in geophysical research in academic, industrial and government fields.

He is an expert in wave field transformations and innovation in data processing technology and has more than 230 refereed publications. He has supervised more than 55 students through completion of their graduate degrees in such fields as seismology and ground-penetrating radar research. He has taught courses in reflection seismology, computational seismology, seismic modeling, seismic inversion, geophysical techniques and rock physics.

In 1997, McMechan was awarded the Virgil Kauffman Gold Medal for technical achievement by the Society of Exploration Geophysicists. His research activities have focused on the development and implementation of new algorithms for numerical simulation of scalar, acoustic, elastic, viscoelastic, anisotropic and poroelastic media and their corresponding imaging and inversion procedures.

His current projects include velocity analysis algorithms, development of procedures for using nine-component seismic data and cluster computing.

McMechan holds a bachelor of applied science degree in geological engineering from the University of British Columbia and a master’s degree in physics (geophysics) from the University of Toronto.

All Kusch lectures are free and open to the public. For additional information, please call 972-883-2272.

About the Polykarp Kusch Lecture Series
The late Polykarp Kusch was the 1955 Nobel laureate in physics. He joined UT Dallas in 1972 and was a UT System Regental Professor. He served on the University’s physics faculty until he retired and was accorded professor emeritus status in 1982. His science career was marked by a delight in teaching and research, and he connected with his students in countless ways, including via presentations of physics experiments in his “Phenomena of Nature” classes. When he retired, the University endowed a program of annual lectures with the theme Concerns of the Lively Mind in his honor.