Appointment: Director, GSS Geoscience Ltd 

Research summary:  He is an independent consultant who has worked in Applied Biostratigraphy since 1988, initially in Indonesia then the UK with a period in the mid 1990s working at GEUS in Copenhagen. At first he provided micropaleontological analytical services on borehole samples, both in the laboratory and at wellsite in operational situations, specialising in foraminifera. At wellsite he has worked in various locations including Trinidad, Angola, Libya and NW Europe (North Sea) in operational situations involving geological monitoring, picking casing points and “biosteering” long-reach horizontal production wells. 

Since the mid 2000s he began working as a consultant and mentor with Neftex Petroleum Consultants in Oxfordshire, UK, (now a Halliburton company) developing the biostratigraphic framework for their Global Earth Model – a global sequence stratigraphic synthesis for the Phanerozoic. This involved building a global database of over 400,000 georeferenced bioevents and zonations, across many different fossil groups, calibrated to a global “standard” chronostratigraphy which, together with input into the timing and magnitude of sea-level change, enabled the intercontinental correlation of sequence stratigraphic surfaces and systems tracts. These data also informed a global suite of paleogeodynamically reconstructed depositional environment maps. These, together with other sequence stratigraphic tools, are used to provide basin-scale regional geological syntheses and “Common Risk Segment” analysis used extensively in resource exploration. Products of this work also included an online biostratigraphic look-up database for clients to assist stratigraphic calibration of their own proprietary data. Later he was part of a team set up to investigate machine-learning applications in the interpretation of biostratigraphic data; the automatic identification of biozones and generation of sea-level curves. 

In the last 3-4 years his focus has switched to the detailed study of (particularly) mid Cretaceous biostratigraphy, focusing on high-resolution biostratigraphy of the foraminifera, especially the Larger Benthic Foraminifera, and their impact on Tethyan regional geology.