Restrictions
The recipient of the Ziad Beydoun Memorial Award is not required to be an AAPG Member. Selection of the winning poster session paper is made only from those poster sessions sponsored by AAPG.
Guidelines for Consideration of Candidates
Judging is conducted by an International Poster Award Committee. The chairman is appointed by the General Chairman of the conference.
Procedure
The Committee’s decision is conveyed by the Chairman to the General Chairman as soon as possible following the conference. The General Chairman then informs the President of the Association who notifies the winners.
Description of Award
The Ziad Beydoun Memorial Award is $500 cash and a walnut plaque bearing the name of the winner and the title of the poster.
Co-authors share the cash award equally, each receiving a certificate mounted on walnut. The award will be presented at the annual convention.
History
Ziad R. Beydoun was a prominent geologist in the Middle East and is largely responsible for surveying and mapping the region’s rock successions. He spent his life in the field, mapping a vast region never before seen, mostly in the desert. He was born in Beirut on Dec. 9, 1924, and initially was schooled in Palestine (Haifa and Jerusalem) and American University of Beirut; at the close of World War II he studied geology at St. Peter’s College, Oxford.
After the demise of Palestine, his family fled to Lebanon, and he started working for Iraq Petroleum Company (the former Turkish Petroleum Company). He spent five years subsurface mapping in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and the Gulf States, before shifting to field work in the Aden Protectorate (Yemen) as a geologist with the Hadramout Survey.
He joined Partex and participated in the discovery of oil in Oman by PDO. In 1963 he became a geological expert to the Lebanese Ministry of National Economy, and shortly thereafter joined American University of Beirut. In 1970 he was appointed full professor and chairman of the geology department there, as well as special advisor to the Council for Scientific Research.
In 1985 he returned to London and joined Marathon Oil. He was appointed scientific director of a UNDP/World Bank project on the hydrocarbon study of the Red Sea/Gulf of Aden region, and at the invitation of the Yemeni government led the committee that pulled together the geology of Yemen, published as part of the International Lexicon of Stratigraphy.
He was an associate editor of the BULLETIN, and he authored over 50 articles and two books, including Arabian Plate Hydrocarbon Geology and Potential – A Plate Tectonic Approach, published by AAPG in 1991 in the Studies in Geology Series.
This award was established in 1990 as the International Poster Award by Executive Committee action. The name of the award was changed to the Ziad Beydoun Memorial Award with the 2001 award.
Funding
Funding for the award is provided through the AAPG Foundation Awards Fund through generous contributions by Saudi Aramco Corporation, Pinar O. Yilmaz and Mrs. Muntaha Saghieh-Beydoun and many other friends and colleagues of Ziad R. Beydoun as a lasting memorial.