"…oh, how fascinated I was by these machines that did as you told them!"

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Valery Polyakov

Born in Kiev, Ukraine (then-USSR) 1964
M.S. degree in Geophysics

Kiev University, 1986

Field of work

Senior Research Associate

Areas of interest outside work

Traveling, reading, studying foreign languages, movies, watching and playing soccer, spending time with my two children.

As an undergraduate I worked in the Petroleum Research Institute. Upon graduation, I worked in the Research Institute of Geophysics at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In both places I pioneered in the use of computers for interpretation of geophysical data.

I immigrated to the USA with my wife and son in 1989 and joined Schlumberger in 1990.

I started with Schlumberger Well Services in Houston, TX as a project engineer in the Interpretation Engineering department and worked there for 5 years developing software applications for interpretation of well logs. I did a lot of Object-Oriented programming and designed a large general-purpose framework for petrophysical applications.

In 1995 transferred to Schlumberger-Doll Research in Ridgefield, CT. and worked on the aspects of 3D visualization in the CyberGeologist project. Then I investigated the applicability of collaborative virtual environments to the Earth sciences and was in charge of building the first in Schlumberger iCenter. Later, I researched emerging web technologies and found new ways to apply them to help in solving problems of accessing distributed data and applications over the Internet.

How did I get interested in science and technology? My dad was a physics teacher and my mom a software engineer, so here I am: a geophysicist and a computer scientist – logical, isn’t it? I always had a solid science background – that’s a real strength of the Russian educational system. Computers were a different story. If it weren’t for my mom, I probably would never have seen a computer until after graduation. Even the one Fortran course offered in the University was taught on the blackboard. Those were days of the Big Iron – you didn’t see it, you just heard about it. But, oh, how fascinated I was by these machines that did as you told them! And I carried this enthusiasm for technology through all my life.

When I am not busy making my computer do cool stuff, I enjoy traveling near and far; reading (among my favorite authors are Mikhail Bulgakov, Albert Camus, Astrid Lindgren, Leon Feuchtwanger and many, many others); studying foreign languages (besides my native Russian and Ukrainian and adoptive-native English, I speak French, some German and Italian and can read Hebrew, albeit without understanding much); watching movies (I can quote from Woody Allen and Monty Python); watching and playing soccer; and of course spending time with my two children. I don’t like waking up early in the morning and I don’t like working on my house, both of which I’m having to do almost every day.