Biography

Raised in Southern California, David Alumbaugh’s interest in Earth science was sparked by a childhood fascination with volcanoes and earthquakes. In the late 1970’s as he was finishing high school, oil prices spiked and a local newspaper published a list of promising future careers, with ‘Geologist’ near the top. This event coupled with the childhood fascination with geological processes led David to pursue an undergraduate degree in Geological Sciences at San Diego State, where he took a keen interest in EM geophysical methods. David’s undergraduate degree was followed by graduate work in EM geophysics at UC Berkeley, and his first post-graduate job was at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he was the co-architect of one of the first 3D EM forward-modeling and inversion algorithms that made use of massively parallel computing platforms. After a four year stint as a professor in the Geological Engineering Program at the University of Wisconsin, David returned to Berkeley, California where he took a position at Schlumberger’s EMI Technology Center and his work focused on commercializing his PhD project in cross-well EM imaging as well as developing an intellectual technology portfolio for marine CSEM. Since leaving Schlumberger for Chevron, NEOS GeoSolutions, the consulting group BlueGreen Geophysics, and now Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, David’s work has continued to focus on the incorporation of EM geophysical techniques into subsurface-characterization workflows, as well as advancing multi-physics data analysis, and to a lesser extent, statistically based methods of fusing multi-physics data into geologic interpretations.