By Laird B. Thompson

When I was five years old I saw a picture of a dinosaur and decided that I wanted to be a paleontologist. In college I scaled down to work on microfossils, which I not only found interesting (one can do a full population study using only a spoonful of raw materials) but also economically viable (I could actually get a paying job working with Foraminifera).

In my 25 years in the oil industry, I have had the great good fortune of being able to "follow my nose" through a series of studies and challenges that interested me.

I moved from biostratigraphy through general stratigraphy (including studies in both siliciclastic and carbonate depositional systems) into petrophysics. I started working with borehole imaging technology in the late 1980s, and began seeing indications of fractures in most of the images I examined.

Over the past decade, I have worked on the issues of characterizing reservoirs whose production is dominated by faults and fractures. I worked on many international fields and ran Mobil's fractured reservoir R&D program for the last five years.

In doing research and in working on both exploration and production problems, the first publication I would turn to for related studies was always the AAPG BULLETIN. To me, the BULLETIN is the most important geological periodical in the industry and one of the top publications in the world. To be selected as a candidate for editor of such a prestigious intellectual vehicle is both a joy and an honor.

I feel that I am in a unique position to bring an array of experience to the job. As noted above, my background has been quite varied, and I have had significant involvement with a broad range of scientific topics, not just a narrow focus of study. Additionally, my work at Mobil involved active participation in a number of industry consortia, which allowed me to interact with a large number of colleagues working in the academic realm at universities in the United States and abroad.

Finally, in teaching an in-house seminar on integrated reservoir characterization, I have worked with a number of colleagues in the engineering and business communities, further broadening my professional experiences.

By accepting a severance and retirement package from the ExxonMobil merger, I am also in the position of having the time and desire to devote all my energies to the position of editor. I have gotten to a point in my professional life that I am able to work on problems because they are interesting to me and are "the right thing to do." I will be able to focus on this endeavor with a minimum of outside distractions.

If elected editor, my goals would be to maintain the high level of quality in BULLETIN technical content, seek to move the medium forward in the information age (I have completed a CD publication with AAPG in 2000) and support opportunities for publishing multidisciplinary studies of increasing importance to the industry as it continues to evolve.