"I was first exposed to geology during my undergraduate junior year when my general earth science professor asked me to volunteer for a marine geology research cruise…"

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Robert Alexander Young

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, 1942
B.Sc. (cum laude), Geology

Brooklyn College, New York City, 1969

M.S. in Oceanography

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 1972

Ph.D. in Marine Geology

Joint Program of the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Inst., 1975

Field of work

Software Development

I was born in Boston, but grew up traveling the US with my parents whose work took them to all parts of the country. After high school and 4+ years of military service, I entered Brooklyn College in New York City where I initially decided to major in Civil Engineering. During my undergraduate studies at Brooklyn, I met and married my wife Rosemary, and we had our first daughter, Susanna in Brooklyn. Our second daughter, Nicole, was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, while I was a graduate student.

I was first exposed to geology during my undergraduate junior year when my general earth science professor asked me to volunteer for a marine geology research cruise run by the University of Connecticut. That experience decided me on a career in geology, which I pursued as a graduate student at MIT and Woods Hole, participating in geologic research cruises to the North Atlantic, Red Sea and the US continental shelf. To take a break from studies and research, I taught earth science at the Cape Cod Community College and learned how to swim in the warm waters of the MIT pool so that I could qualify as a SCUBA diver. My thesis research involved seafloor experiments using an erosion tunnel I invented and named Seaflume. I used Seaflume to study how undisturbed seafloor sediments erode. Some of the experiments involved SCUBA diving and later took me to the Virgin Islands and the Spanish Mediterranean continental shelf.

After receiving my Ph.D., I joined the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorologic Lab in Miami. There I was part of a team that investigated the biological, chemical and potential human impact of municipal and industrial waste dumping on the continental shelf off Long Island, New York, and New Jersey. The Seaflume and wave, current and suspended sediment measurements that I made helped the biologists and chemists to understand and model the potential effects of erosion, transport and deposition of pollutants that were absorbed and traveled with fine, clayey, sediments. During my time in Miami, I also enjoyed teaching at the University of Miami school of oceanography and sponsored several graduate students during their Ph.D. studies.

In 1982 I decided to change directions and joined the oil industry to study sedimentation and basin development at the Exxon Production Research Lab in Houston where the principles of sequence stratigraphy, a revolutionary new way of thinking about sea level changes and their effects on deposition of sediments that form petroleum reservoirs, were being developed. These ideas had initially been developed from seismic recordings, and I worked on a team that extended the same ideas to well logs, cores, and rock outcrops. I also taught other geologists how to decipher the layering they saw in cores, well logs and outcrops in terms of sequence stratigraphy and depositional environments.

In 1988, I joined the Schlumberger Wireline company to help introduce the new borehole-imaging device called the Formation Microscanner. This was a very exciting challenge and I began my Schlumberger career by moving to New Orleans and managing a team of geologists who were interpreting the images for oil company clients. Since then, I have worked on projects to interpret geochemical log measurements in geologic context and in developing image and dip interpretation techniques from measurements made while drilling. My Wireline assignments moved me between Houston and New Orleans and to Wireline headquarters in Paris. My most recent assignment is with the GeoQuest headquarters Product Development division in Houston where I lead the planning activities for GeoFrame geologic software development.