Honors and Awards Has Several Firsts By Dean Clark
Editor, The Leading Edge  The 2010 Honors and Awards Ceremony, held Sunday afternoon, broke new ground in several areas. The string of "firsts" started with the first award of the session, recognition of 75 years of SEG membership by Jerome F. Freel. Freel, now 98 years old, joined SEG in 1935, just five years after the Society was founded, and is believed to be the only person to have been a member for 75 years. The Maurice Ewing Medal, SEG's highest award, was responsible for a pair of "firsts." The honor was awarded posthumously for the first time, to the late Anthony R. (Tony) Barringer, and was also awarded to another eminent geophysicist, M.N. Nafi Toksöz. This is the first time the Ewing Medal has been awarded to two individuals in the same career. Barringer was world famous for several inventions in mineral exploration. His INPUT airborne EM system is credited with discovering more than 25 orebodies worth more than US$100 billion. Toksoz spent more than 40 years as a professor at MIT and founded its highly respected Earth Resources Laboratory. He has more than 180 technical publications and mentored many students who have gone on to become leaders in the profession. The Virgil Kauffman Gold Medal was also awarded to two individuals, Gerard Thomas Schuster and Kees Wapenaar, for separate but seminal contributions to the emerging field of seismic interferometry. The Kauffman Medal has had multiple winners in the past but the previous multiple winners had collaborated on one development. This was the first time the multiple winners had made separate contributions. The Reginald Fessenden Award also had two winners for separate contributions, Samuel Gray and Arthur Benjamin Weglein. Gray is well known as one of the world's leading experts on wave propagation and migration. Weglein has led the way in using the inverse scattering series for multiple elimination. It is thought that Gray set a personal record by winning three different awards this year. He also was the lead author of the article selected as the Best Paper in The Leading Edge in 2009 and was a long-time staff member at the Amoco Research Center which was one of two winners, along with the Brazilian Geophysical Society, of the Distinguished Achievement Award. Gray was also a co-author of Best Paper in Geophysics in 1999 and is believed to be the first person to sweep the "best" honors for SEG's two journals. Honorary Membership, SEG's second highest honor, was awarded to Michael S. Bahorich, Walter S. Lynn, and Bjørn Ursin. Bradley A. Birkelo, Steve Danbom, John R. Sumner, and Mary L. Fleming were honored with Life Membership. Deyan Draganov and Jeffrey Shragge received the J. Clarence Karcher Award, given to outstanding geophysicists under the age of 35. The session, as usual, ended with the Presidential Address, annually one of the final official acts of SEG's highest elected leader before turning over the duties to the new Executive Committee. Steve Hill, SEG President in 2009-10, stressed that the 21st century SEG has three priorities: serve a global membership, accelerate innovation, and inspire the geoscientists of tomorrow. He described in detail the recent programs and policies that SEG has adopted to address the priorities. He concluded with a final thought that, in meeting the demands, SEG would not stray from its basic principles: geophysics is at the core of all actions; the Society remains border-free, member-driven, and with a level playing field; that it invest in the future, in both technology and students; and that it is run as a business in a way that safeguards its financial health. Click here for event photos Related Annual Meeting News: | 
