Joseph A Dellinger

Joe Dellinger was born in the SEG hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and learned to ride a bicycle in the Amoco Tulsa Research Center parking lot. Joe’s father Tom Dellinger led a research group at the Mobil Field Research Lab in the 1970’s-1980’s. His team coined the term “Extended Reach Drilling” to describe to management what it was they were doing. Given this background, it is not surprising that Joe majored in Geophysics at Texas A&M. He received a PhD in 1991 from Jon Claerbout’s Stanford Exploration Project. He then did a 3-year post-doc at the University of Hawaii before joining Amoco in Tulsa in 1994. He moved to BP in Houston in 1999 and has worked there since. In his career he has specialized in Anisotropy, multi-component algorithms and processing, and most recently “looking for useful information in data that would normally be ignored”, i.e. “Forensic data processing”. This has included studying the 2006 “Green Canyon” earthquake, investigating how the Valhall Ocean-bottom-cable array might be used between seismic surveys, and characterizing sources and noise in deep water ocean-bottom-seismic Gulf of Mexico data so that we might process it better. Joe was awarded life membership in the SEG in 2001 for his services in helping the SEG to successfully adapt to the internet age. Joe’s hobbies include attending the Houston Symphony, photographing birds, recording frog calls in the swamps around Houston, and astronomy at the George Observatory, which is located an hour’s drive southwest of Houston. Asteroid “78392 Dellinger” was named in Joe’s honor.

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