Dirk-Jan van Manen

Dirk-Jan van Manen

President year	2000
Membership	Honorary Member

Dirk-Jan van Manen, recipient of the J. Clarence Karcher Award and a project engineer with WesternGeco, has authored or co-authored eight technical papers in peer-reviewed journals such as GEOPHYSICS, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Physics Review Letters, and Geophysical Journal International. The topics of these papers vary from seismic interferometry to seismic modeling in inhomogeneous media, to shear-wave statics. He is also author or co-author of nine patent applications, whose topics range from noise suppression to multicomponent data processing to seabed statics. Dirk-Jan was a co-organizer of a 2005 SEG postconvention workshop and winner of EAGE’s Van Weelden (Young Professional) Award in 2007. He also received Honorable Mention (Geophysics) in 2010.

Honorable Mention (Geophysics) 2010

Kemal Ordemir, Ali Ozbek, Dirk-Jan van Manen, Massimiliano Vassallo received Honorable Mention (Geophysics) for their paperOn data-independent multicomponent interpolators and the use of priors for optimal reconstruction and 3D up/down separation of pressure wavefields.

Biography Citation for the J. Clarence Karcher Award 2008

Contributed by Johan O. A. Robertson

Dirk-Jan van Manen did his undergraduate studies at University of Utrecht in The Netherlands. Together withHanneke Paulssen in Utrecht and Andrew Curtis at University of Edinburgh, I supervised Dirk-Jan’s thesis work and hosted him at WesternGeco’s Oslo Technology Centre in 2000-01 where he explored whether receiver functions from earthquake seismology would be applicable for nearsurface characterization of multicomponent exploration seismic seabed data. Although we did know that graduates in geosciences from Utrecht were among the best trained students available, in hindsight, we did throw Dirk-Jan into the deep end with such a challenging task. Dirk-Jan exceeded our most optimistic expectations and quickly demonstrated exceptional creative and analytical skills while not shying away from data interrogation. His master’s work was published in the “Fast Track” category of Geophysical Journal International where he showed that receiver functions can indeed be used to solve for shear-wave statics on a real 2D seabed seismic data set from the North Sea.

In 2002, after completion of his diploma thesis, Andrew Curtis and I took on Dirk-Jan as a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh to extend his work on the applicability of receiver functions to exploration seismology. The PhD research of Dirk-Jan was initially focused on the relation between refl ection and transmission data. However, inspired by recent advances in the areas of time-reversed acoustics and seismic interferometry, Dirk-Jan made an important discovery related to modeling of seismic data. Dirk-Jan showed how Green’s functions between arbitrary points in an Earth model can be recovered at a very low cost without compromising on accuracy, as long as a minimal number of initial computations have been performed. This research was published in the prestigious journal Physical Review Letters and may have a fundamental impact on how we for instance approach full waveform inversion of seismic data. A longer version of this work, extended to the fully elastic case, was also published in the special issue of GEOPHYSICS on seismic interferometry. In the fi nal part of his thesis, Dirk-Jan showed how his new insights into modeling enable the implementation of so-called exact boundary conditions which in turn can be used to for instance solve waveform inversion problems. This work was published as a JASA Express Letter.

During his graduate studies, Dirk-Jan held summer internships at Statoil Research Centre in Trondheim, Schlumberger Cambridge Research, WesternGeco London Technology Centre, and WesternGeco Oslo Technology Centre. During these internships, Dirk-Jan had a signifi cant impact on projects that were not necessarily directly related to his thesis work. Following his PhD, Dirk-Jan has been a researcher in WesternGeco’s London Technology Centre. Dirk-Jan has also already made signifi cant contributions to the Society of Exploration Geophysicists. He has provided many excellent reviews for manuscripts submitted to GEOPHYSICS. Together with Andrew Curtis, Kees Wapenaar, and myself, he was a co-organizer of the SEG postconvention workshop in 2005 on “Seismic Interferometry, Daylight Imaging and Time Reversal.” He was also a guest editor for the 2007 special issue of GEOPHYSICS on seismic modeling.

Dirk-Jan is an exceptionally bright young scientist. He has very high standards for his work and is meticulously thorough. He has a solid theoretical background and is exceptionally creative. He does not give up easily and always seeks to fi nd a solution to problems presented to him. He is known by people around him to be a caring person who always takes time to help colleagues and mentors junior staff or interns. I feel very fortunate to have gotten to know Dirk-Jan on both a professional and personal basis.