Energy leader and professional Brian Horn served as President of AAPG from 1 July 2025–30 June 2026. During Horn’s tenure, AAPG developed and began executing a new three-year strategic plan, reduced overhead and other costs, and carried out many efforts aimed at increasing membership and student engagement. You can watch the entire year in review video here, and below are some highlights.

Enhancing Operations and Cutting Expenses

Leadership evaluated AAPG’s historic financial performance and scaled AAPG’s operations to reduce overhead. One of the major cost centers historically was in IT, accounting, and payroll functions. To address this, AAPG reduced its staff and engaged external IT and accounting partners. This resulted in:

  • A 53 percent reduction in IT and accounting costs
  • A roughly $305,000 reduction in operating budget

Many of these funds were redirected toward member benefits such as sections, divisions, regions, and programs.

Creating and Implementing a Three-Year Strategy

To create continuity across AAPG executive committee terms, Horn and AAPG Executive Director Tom Wilker imagined and unveiled a new strategic direction for the organization. The strategy focused on member value, engagement, modernization, and organizational sustainability.

Some changes that were implemented in year one included:

  • A refreshed representation of AAPG globally via new branding and brand standards
  • Defining and articulating a member value proposition
  • Launching a new website with more modern user capabilities and backend tools
  • Migrating membership data to a new membership database to help streamline the onboarding and renewal processes. This also enabled AAPG to institute auto-renewal capabilities for membership.

A Focus on Students

The new strategic plan includes a yearly president’s focus. Horn’s focus was re-engaging students and universities. “I felt like the most important thing that I could do in a year was to try to engage students in geoscience, because those people are the future of our organization,” Horn says.

Horn focused on students by:

  • Conducting a university tour that spanned four universities in Colorado and Wyoming
  • Creating a student chapter kit to guide students wanting to launch an AAPG student chapter on their campus. These kits are available for download on AAPG’s website.
  • Revitalizing the Imperial Barrel Award program via a new website, ensuring program consistency, and bringing the global IBA final back to Houston, hosted by Murphy Oil. TotalEnergies hosted the North American semi-final event.

As part of a renewed focus on educational resources, AAPG’s European region launched the Let’s Connect webinar series. The series discussed topics in mining, the energy transition, and renewable energy.

Continued to Host Successful Events

AAPG, alongside its sister societies and partners, continues to host and produce some of the premier events in geoscience and energy. In 2025 and 2026, these events included:

  • IMAGE 2025 in Houston, Texas
  • The NAPE Summit in Houston, Texas
  • ICE 2025 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
  • IPTC 2026 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates
  • CCUS 2026 in The Woodlands, Texas
  • URTeC 2026 in Houston, Texas
  • The Venezuela Technical and E&P Summit 2026 in The Woodlands, Texas
  • AI/ML in Subsurface Energy in Houston, Texas
  • Energy Opportunities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Modernizing AAPG’s Digital Infrastructure

AAPG completed its most extensive modernization effort in years across its technology stack and operations. Efforts included:

  • Switching AAPG’s content management system from DNN to WordPress, increasing flexibility, usability, and scalability
  • Transitioning the Explorer magazine to a fully digital reading experience and creating a modern digital archive of past issues. This will enhance member benefits and advertising opportunities and hopefully expand readership.
  • Migrating to a new Association Management System to support auto-renewals, international credit card payments, and more.
  • Upgrading from Great Plains financial software to Sage Intacct to provide stronger financial reporting and operational automations

Increasing the Rigor of the AAPG Bulletin

AAPG Editor Daniel Minisini worked to enhance the quality and rigor of AAPG’s leading technical journal. The publication’s acceptance rate has shifted from 40 percent to 30 percent, and the period of time from acceptance to publication has moved from 100 days to seven days. Minisini also updated the instructions to reviewers for the first time in more than 20 years and provided more user-friendly links for papers to Geoscience World rather than DataPages.

What’s Next

  • AAPG recently announced the merger of DataPages with Geoscience World. As part of this merger, the two organizations will be working on a large language model AI tool.
  • AAPG will be seeking better ways to partner with its six sections, each of which is its own self-funded 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6).
  • Regions, which are a part of AAPG financially, will be empowered to become more self-sustainable. AAPG will examine ways to add more member value through its regions.
  • AAPG will continue focusing on growth via diversification of revenue streams and member retention strategies.
  • AAPG remains focused on modernization, increasing membership, operational efficiency, and long-term sustainability.
  • Future priorities include continued technology optimization, growing non-member revenue streams, and strengthening AAPG’s position as a global leader in geoscience.

Watch the entire year in review here.