AAPG member Grant Wach, petroleum geoscience professor at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, has been named the inaugural winner of the AAPG Foundation’s Professorial Award recipient.
AAPG member Grant Wach, petroleum geoscience professor at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, has been named the inaugural winner of the AAPG Foundation’s Professorial Award recipient.
The honor, to be given annually to a professor for “Excellence in the Teaching of Natural Resources in the Earth Sciences,” comes with a $1,000 prize from the AAPG Foundation.
Wach – who personally had 15 nominations for the prize – was one of 16 applicants for the award, which was determined by the AAPG Academic Liaison Committee.
Over the last 25 years Wach has been “directly involved in the advanced training of hundreds of professional geoscientists and engineers who are already highly qualified in their fields,” he said.
“I have trained geoscientists and engineers in the lecture room and in the field in Nigeria, South Africa, Trinidad, China, Malaysia, the UK, Colombia, Canada and the United States,” he said.
“I have had the opportunity to lecture in extraordinary settings,” he added, “from storm swept coasts to the deserts of China.”
An article on Wach will be published in a future EXPLORER. For more details on the Foundation’s Professorial Award go to blog.aapg.org/foundation/?p=584.
In other Foundation news, 84 recipients from 17 countries have been named to receive 2012 Grants-in-Aid from the AAPG Foundation.
The Foundation has awarded $175,000 in grants to the recipients, who were selected from an applicant pool of 310. Selection was based on merit and, in part, on financial need.
Grants range from $1,000 to $3,000 and are made annually by the Foundation to graduate students around the world to those whose thesis research has application to the search for and development of petroleum and energy-related resources, and/or to related environmental geology issues.
Factors weighed in the process included: an applicant’s qualifications as indicated by past performance; originality and imagination of the proposed project; support of the department in which the work is being done; and perceived significance of the project.