18–20 February 2025
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
18–20 February 2025
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
 |
Climate Change, Atmospheric and Social: Implications for the Future Geoscience Workforce |
| 0900-1030 hours |
| Wednesday, 19 February 2025 |
| Distinguished Lecturer: |
| Sherilyn Williams-Stroud |
| Research Scientist Illinois State Geological Survey, Prairie Research Institute University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
Climate change is not only happening in the atmosphere but also in the anthroposphere; in some ways the former could drive or exacerbate the latter, with extreme weather excursions and extreme excursions from societal norms occurring all over the earth. Accomplishing geoscience for a common goal – whether that is for successful business activities, resource assessment for public planning, mitigating the impacts of geological hazards, or for the sheer love of furthering knowledge and understanding – can and should be done by a workforce that is equitably developed and supported. Difficulty arises when the value of institutional programs to increase equity and diversity is not realised.
The development of a robust geoscience workforce of the future can be addressed the same way scientific projects are addressed. A seismic monitoring program could be used as an analog, where the development and implementation could contain the following elements:
Characterise the area and the potential reservoir, collect data (including pre-injection data to form a baseline), analyse the data, develop a model of reservoir response, evaluate ongoing data collection and update where necessary, adjust monitoring program to mitigate potential risks indicated by the data and modeling.
The approach for successfully developing the geoscience workforce requires only a few changes to this “protocol”:
Evaluating the success of such a project includes keeping abreast of future research opportunities and applications to geoscience. Forward-looking training will ensure that the geoscience profession remains relevant to society and can increase the numbers of geoscientists from all demographics, thereby strengthening and maintaining our field. This talk will describe some of the activities currently in progress that support equitable and diverse workforce development.
Sherilyn Williams-Stroud is professor of practice and director of the Berg-Hughes Center at Texas A&M University. A structural geologist with more than 30 years of experience in industry, government, and academia, her areas of expertise include structural and fracture analysis and modeling for the oil and gas and mining industries, and geothermal energy production, with a specialisation in microseismic data interpretation and induced seismicity. She has held adjunct positions at the University of Houston, California State University at Los Angeles and Northridge, and was a full-time faculty member at Whittier College. Her industry experience includes major operators, consulting, and service companies, working in research and technology development. She is an active member of several professional organisations and received the AAPG Honorary Member Award in 2022 and was an AAPG Distinguished Lecturer for 2023-24. From 2015-19 she served as a member of the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) Committee on seismology and geodynamics, planning and moderating workshops to help inform the federal government on scientific issues important to the nation’s needs, and recently she was a member of the National Petroleum Council’s Coordinating Subcommittee for the recently released report from the greenhouse gas study on emissions in the oil and gas industry, CH4arting the CO2urse. Williams-Stroud received her bachelor’s degree in geology from Oberlin College, and her master’s and doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University, and is a licensed professional geologist in the state of California.
