Terry Engelder, a leading authority on the recent Marcellus gas shale play, will be touring Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Romania and Switzerland from October 7-17, 2013.

The Distinguished Lecture Program is funded by the AAPG Foundation. Engelder holds degrees from Penn State B.S. (’68), Yale M.S. (’72) and Texas A&M, Ph.D. (’73). He is currently a Professor of Geosciences at Penn State and has previously served on the staffs of the US Geological Survey, Texaco, and Columbia University. Short-term academic appointments include those of Visiting Professor at Graz University in Austria and Visiting Professor at the University of Perugia in Italy. Other academic distinctions include a Fulbright Senior Fellowship in Australia, Penn State’s Wilson Distinguished Teaching Award, membership in a US earth science delegation to visit the Soviet Union immediately following Nixon-Brezhnev détente, and the singular honor of helping Walter Alvarez collect the samples that led to the famous theory for dinosaur extinction by large meteorite impact. He has written over 160 research papers, many focused on Appalachia, and a book, the research monograph Stress Regimes in the Lithosphere.

His research focus for the past 35 years has been the interaction between earth stress and rock fracture. His work on gas shales first caught industry attention in the late 1970s and industry has engaged him ever since in learning how to recover gas from black shale. In the international arena, he has worked on exploration and production problems with companies including Saudi Aramco, Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Agip, and Petrobras.

In 2011 he was named to the Foreign Policy Magazine’s list of Top 100 Global Thinkers for drawing international attention to the value of gas shale as an energy source.