board members
Dieter Werthmüller
Dieter is a research geophysicist and open-source enthusiast meandering between academia and industry. His main interests are electromagnetic methods for exploration and civil engineering tasks. He obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2014 and has worked in the academic, energy, and civil engineering sectors in Switzerland, Scotland, Norway, Mexico, and the Netherlands.
Jo Walsh
Jo is a Senior Innovation and Research Scientist at the Ordnance Survey in the UK. Jo has a background in programming (perl, Python), particularly geospatial analysis. She was previously a director at the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. Jo has a degree in English from the University of Oxford.
Leonardo Uieda
Leo is the leader of the Computer-Oriented Geoscience Lab at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. He is also the originator and lead developer of the numerous open source Python projects in the Fatiando a Terra project, and a contributor to many others, including GMT. His geophysical contributions in gravity and magnetics are underpinned by his strong advocacy for openness and reproducibility in science. Leo is a proud father and amateur baker. Read more.
Maria Cecilia Bravo
Maria is a Petroleum Engineer with experience on well construction, mathematical modelling and data interpretation, real time drilling operations, drilling efficiency, pore pressure prediction methods while drilling, formation testing and fluid sampling, production optimization, geomechanics and petrophysics data. Maria works at Equinor in Norway.
Matt Hall
Matt is a scientific developer at Equinor. He started the Software Underground in 2014 to help keep people connected around the hackathons that Agile Scientific was organizing. Matt's background is in petroleum exploration, seismic interpretation, and reservoir geophysics. He graduated from the University of Manchester in 1997 with a PhD in geology and has worked at Statoil, Landmark, ConocoPhillips, and Agile. Matt is the Secretary and Treasurer of the Software Underground.
Matteo Niccoli
Matteo is a geoscientist in Calgary, Canada, with 17 years in the oil & gas industry, on-shore and off-shore projects (Western Canada and Norway). Matteo has field experience and strong analytical and interpretation skills, and is a licensed Professional Geophysicist in Alberta. He has a keen interest and strong focus on seismic data enhancement and integration with geology, geomechanics, and engineering. He is also passionate about mentoring and knowledge sharing.
Rowan Cockett
Rowan began creating software tools for scientific education and explication while still an undergraduate at the University of Calgary, launching the popular Visible Geology site in 2011. He went on to co-found 3point Science, building web-based visualization software for geoscientists, eventually selling the company to the company that became Seequent in 2016. Most recently, he has been creating Curvenote, the communication tool transforming how scientists work and collaborate. Read more.
Santiago Soler
Santi is a Postdoctoral Researcher Fellow at the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences of the University of British Columbia. He is a longtime GNU/Linux user and Free Software supporter, and one of the core developers of Fatiando a Terra: a collection of open-source Python tools for forward and inverse modelling in geophysics. When not researching, coding or teaching he is rock climbing, trekking, mountaineering, biking or kayaking.
Past board members
The following board members served Software Underground for more than a year.
Luisa Zuluaga
Luisa is a structural geologist trained at the National University of Colombia, IFP School (MSc), and the University of Bergen (PhD). She has worked as an exploration geologist in the energy sector, then a researcher, and is now an engineering geologist at Atkins in Norway. She is also a board member (vice chair) of GeoLatinas. After joining Software Underground in 2019 she's been steadily gaining coding skills and keeping current on the latest trends and possibilities of hands-on tech within geoscience.
Olawale Ibrahim
Olawale is a machine learning developer at Earth Science Analytics. Previously he was an Applied Geophysics student of the Federal University of Technology Akure researching machine learning techniques for better seismic data interpretation. He also contributed to machine learning projectst at dGB Earth Sciences. He is interested in developing open source geoscience and machine learning projects.
Filippo Broggini
Filippo joined the Software Underground community in 2016 after discovering the wonderful world of the SWUNG hackathons. His current interests are DevOps, visualization, and NLP. He works as Solutions Engineer at Squirro and previously was a Senior Scientist at ETH Zürich. Filippo holds a PhD in Geophysics from Colorado School of Mines. In his spare time, he enjoys cycling and is learning to play the banjo.
Steve Purves
Steve joined Software Underground in 2014 shortly after transitioning to remote contract work and becoming addicted to subsurface hackathons. He spends his time developing software products and tech for applications in scientific and industrial domains and especially likes working at the edge of the discovery process. His link to digital subsurface comes from ~15 years spent in E&P software vendors developing software and algorithms mainly analysing 3D seismic to support interpreters.
Brendon Hall
Brendon Hall is VP of Geoscience at Petro.ai. Previously, he was director of the Energy Solutions Group at Enthought. He has over 10 years of experience using computational techniques to solve problems in geoscience. Brendon has a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, a BEng in mechanical engineering, and a BSc in computer science from Western University in Canada.
Chance Sanger
Chance is an Energy Solutions Advisor at Dell Technologies. Previously, she wore all the hats as a developer at a mapping software startup. Any programming that uncovers unorthodox unknowns or improves the lives of people lights her fire, and she’s been involved with Swung since 2017. Chance has a degree in Petroleum Engineering, and has 9+ years experience as an Engineer, data scientist, and project manager in the Energy Industry.
Leiaka Welcome
Leiaka is a PhD student and research assistant at Colorado School of Mines. She has a maser’s degree in geology from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, and a bachelor’s degree from Midwestern State University.
Founding board members
The purpose of the founding board was to take the society from its initial found to its first Annual General Meeting, in April 2021. At that time, we will held elections and started to establish longer-lasting protocols. The founding board was: Brendon Hall, Chance Sanger, David Holmes, Dieter Werthmüller, Filippo Broggini, Jesper Dramsch, Jo Walsh, Matt Hall, and Steve Purves.