Geologist Vail awarded Franklin Medal

Geologist Vail awarded Franklin Medal

Rice Professor Emeritus Peter Vail will be among those honored later this month when the Franklin Institute hands out its prestigious awards recognizing outstanding achievement in science, engineering and technology.

Peter Vail

Vail, the W. Maurice Ewing Professor Emeritus of Oceanography, will receive the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science at an awards ceremony in Philadelphia April 21.

The medal honors his pioneering and innovative ideas for using seismic reflections to identify sequences of subsurface rock layers, greatly enhancing exploration for oil-containing rock. He also recognized that similar changes in the rock record appear worldwide and can be attributed to global changes in sea level, thus contributing to greater understanding of Earth’s geological history.

Vail’s innovative concepts sequence stratigraphy have had far-reaching implications for both science and commerce, revolutionizing the field of stratigraphy and greatly enhancing methods for oil exploration.

Vail joined Rice’s faculty in 1986 after a 30-year career at Exxon; he retired from Rice in 2001. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College in 1952 and his Ph.D. from Northwestern in 1956.

Among his many honors are the Legendary Geoscientist Award from the American Geological Institute, the Penrose Medal from the Geological Society of America and the Sidney Powers Memorial Medal and the Distinguished Educator Award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. Vail is a fellow of the Geological Society of London, the Geological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of Sigma Xi and the American Geological Institute.

The Franklin Institute was established in 1824 in Philadelphia to train artisans and mechanics in the fundamentals of science and today is dedicated to education and science literacy and serving the public through its museum and outreach programs. For nearly two centuries, the Franklin Institute Awards Program has recognized those whose great innovation has benefited humanity, advanced science, launched new fields of inquiry and deepened the understanding of the universe.

The Benjamin Franklin Medals are given annually in seven disciplines of science: chemistry, computer and cognitive science, earth and environmental science, electrical engineering, life science, mechanical engineering and physics. Award winners are chosen by the institute’s Committee on Science and the Arts, a group of distinguished international leaders in science and technology who select those whose achievements reflect the spirit, innovation and inspiration of Benjamin Franklin himself.

The list of Franklin Institute laureates reads like a “who’s who” in the history of 19th- and 20th-century science and includes Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein and Rice’s Richard Smalley, University Professor, the Gene and Norman Hackerman Professor of Chemistry and professor of physics.