Zheng Wins Karcher Award

Award Recognizes Exceptional Research Contributions

In October, Yingcai Zheng, assistant professor in the University of Houston’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, was honored as a recipient of the 2015 J. Clarence Karcher Award from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG).

Yingcai Zheng
Yingcai Zheng accepts the Society of Exploration Geophysicists’ 2015 J. Clarence Karcher Award from SEG President Chris Liner.
The Karcher Award is given each year “in recognition of significant contributions to the science and technology of exploration geophysics by a young geophysicist of outstanding abilities,” with recipients required to be less than 35 years old. Up to three people can receive the award each year.

The presentation took place in New Orleans during SEG’s 2015 Annual Meeting where Zheng was honored with a plaque commemorating his award. His research contribution was identified as being for “characterization of fractured reservoirs.”

Zheng joined the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics faculty in September 2014 from the Earth Resources Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in seismology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2007. His research areas include nonlinear seismic inversion, geophysical characterization of fractured reservoirs, subsalt imaging, upper mantle discontinuities and planetary geophysics of Mercury and Mars.