Tariq A. Alkhalifah is a professor in the Physical Sciences and Engineering Division. He joined KAUST in June 2009. Before he joined KAUST, Alkhalifah was research professor and director of the Oil and Gas Research Institute at King Abdulaziz City for Science & Technology (KACST). Previously, he held the positions of associate research professor, assistant research professor, and research assistant at KACST. From 1996 to 1998, Alkhalifah served as a postdoctoral researcher for the Stanford Exploration Project at Stanford University, United States. He received the J. Clarence Karcher Award from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) in 1998 and the Conrad Schlumberger Award from the European Association for Geoscientists & Engineers (EAGE) in 2003, and served as an honorary lecturer for the SEG in 2011. He also received the Virgil Kauffman Gold medal from the SEG in 2023. Alkhalifah received his doctoral degree in geophysics and his master’s degree in geophysical engineering, both from the Colorado School of Mines, United States. He holds a bachelor’s degree in geophysics from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia. Alkhalifah’s research interest include seismic imaging and waveform inversion in complex media, and recently his interest included the utilization of machine learning for such objectives.

Ana Paula Muller has been a geophysicist in the Technology Department of Petrobras Exploration since 2014, developing algorithms for migration velocity analyses and FWI. She recently completed a postdoc stage at the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics (CBPF), researching the integration of deep learning methods into the velocity model building flow. She is currently working on the applications of artificial intelligence technologies in Petrobras's seismic processing algorithms.

Felix J. Herrmann is a professor with appointments at the College of Sciences (EAS), Computing (CSE), and Engineering (ECE) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He leads the Seismic Laboratory for Imaging and modeling (SLIM) and he is co-founder/director of the Center for Machine Learning for Seismic (ML4Seismic). This Center is designed to foster industrial research partnerships and drive innovations in artificial-intelligence assisted seismic imaging, interpretation, analysis, and time-lapse monitoring. In 2019, he toured the world presenting the SEG Distinguished Lecture. In 2020, he was the recipient of the SEG Reginald Fessenden Award for his contributions to seismic data acquisition with compressive sensing. Since his arrival at Georgia Tech in 2017, he expanded his research program to include machine learning for Bayesian wave-equation based inference using techniques from simulation-based inference. More recently, he started a research program on seismic monitoring of Geological Carbon Storage, which includes the development of an uncertainty-aware Digital Twin.

Tianze graduated with a B.Sc. in Applied Geophysics from Jilin University, China, in June 2015 and later earned his M.Sc. in Geological Engineering at the same university in June 2018. He joined CREWES in September 2018 and completed his Ph.D. in 2024 under the supervision of Kris Innanen. His research focuses on forward modeling methods, seismic inversion, optimization methods, uncertainty quantification and machine learning.

Geophysicist with >30 years international track record including 20 years with Schlumberger, 4 years with Weatherford and recent years actively involved in Machine Learning for both oilfield and non oilfield applications. Work includes developing solutions / applications around i.e. Transformer networks, probabilistic Machine Learning, etc.

Currently working as a technical consultant to Geophysical Insights, Houston TX for Continental Europe, Middle East and Asia, and the Delphi Consortium at the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands.

Laurent Demanet is Professor of Applied Mathematics, in the Department of Mathematics at MIT. He holds a joint appointment with the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, where he is the Director of MIT's Earth Resources Laboratory.Previously, he was Szego assistant professor (a postdoctoral position) in the Department of Mathematics at Stanford. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2006 under Emmanuel Candes, in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Caltech. He completed his undergraduate studies in mathematical engineering and theoretical physics at Universite de Louvain, Belgium.He is the recipient of a Sloan research fellowship, a CAREER award from NSF, and a Young Investigator award from AFOSR. His research interests include applied analysis, scientific computing, machine learning, inverse problems, and wave propagation. His group studies the mathematical and numerical challenges of inverse wave scattering.

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Mrinal K. Sen is a professor of Geophysics and holder of the Morgan Davis Centennial Chair in Petroleum Geology at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, and the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin. He also serves as the director of the ‘Machine Learning and Data Analytics in Geosciences” graduate certificate program at the Jackson school. During 2013 and 2014, Mrinal served as the director of the National Geophysical Research Institute, Hyderabad, India. He received his M.Sc degree from IIT(ISM) Dhanbad and PhD from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA. Mrinal is known internationally for his work on theoretical and computational seismology, geophysical inversion, and AI and ML in Geosciences. He has published over 200 peer reviewed journal papers and two books on Geophysical Inversion. He has received many awards including the Honorary membership of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists “for extraordinary contributions as a geophysicist, educator and author”, the ‘Joseph C. Walter award for research excellence’, the ‘distinguished educator award’ at the University of Texas, and the distinguished alumnus award from IIT and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is the recipient of 2018 Virgil Kauffman gold medal of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists for making significant advancement in the sciences of exploration geophysics in the last five years. He has been chosen by the SEG to be the instructor of a one-day ‘Distinguished Instructor Short Course’ in 2024-25. The subject of his DISC is ‘Physics and Data driven models for seismic data analysis.’