01 June, 2011

Student Chapters Grab ACE Spotlight

IBA, poster winners announced

 

Graduate students representing the University of Texas at Austin won first place in this year’s AAPG Imperial Barrel Award contest – and students from the same school also took the top three student poster awards.

2011 IBA winners from The University of Texas in Austin

2011 IBA winners from The University of Texas in Austin
2011 IBA winners from The University of Texas in Austin

Graduate students representing the University of Texas at Austin won first place in this year’s AAPG Imperial Barrel Award contest – and students from the same school also took the top three student poster awards.

The IBA finals, which involved 12 teams representing each AAPG Section and Region, were held in Houston right before the start of the recent AAPG Annual Convention and Exhibition.

AAPG’s IBA program is an annual basin/prospect evaluation competition for geoscience graduate students from universities around the world. The teams compete to win scholarship funds dedicated to graduate student petroleum geoscience education.

Each IBA team can have up to five student team members. This year’s regional-level competition attracted 87 teams.

By winning the finals, the UT team received a trophy, individual medals and a $20,000 prize for their petroleum geoscience department.

Finishing second (Selley Cup winners) was the team from the University of Southampton, England, representing the European Region, which earned individual medals and $10,000 in scholarship funds for the department.

Finishing third (Stoneley Medal winners) was the team from Sultan Qaboos University, from Muscat, Oman, representing the Middle East Region. They received individual medals and $5,000 for their department.

The remaining nine finalists each earned $1,000 in scholarship funds for their respective schools, plus individual medals for themselves as IBA finals participants. The finals teams were (alphabetical order):

  • African Region – Cairo University.
  • Asia-Pacific Region – Chulalongkorn University.
  • Canada Region – University of Calgary.
  • Eastern Section – Indiana University.
  • Latin America Region – Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Sede Bogatá.
  • Mid-Continent Section – University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
  • Pacific Section – San Diego State University.
  • Rocky Mountain Section – Utah State University.
  • Southwest Section – University of Texas at El Paso.

The student poster awards, sponsored by Shell Oil, went to:

  • First place: Henry Campos, Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin.
  • Second place: Kurtus Woolf, University of Texas at Austin.
  • Third place: Rocio Bernal-Olaya, Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin.
  • Fourth place: Greg Baniak, University of Alberta.

Other awards presented in Houston included the Jim Hartman Service to Students Award, which went to AAPG member Charles“Chuck” Caughey, and the AAPG Outstanding Student Chapter award, sponsored by Schlumberger, which went to San Diego State and Gadjah Mada universities.

Receiving honorable mention awards were the Student Chapters at the University of Bucharest, the University of Utah, the University of Padjadjaran and Stephen F. Austin State University.