Paul Sandwell - Associate Partner, Mathematics, Geophysics, and Programming
Paul was born in Beckenham, Kent (UK), growing up in several different places in the UK as his father's job moved around. He attended high school at Warwick School and earned his Bachelor's Degree in Physics from Birmingham University. His first job was as editor for technical documentation for a company producing guided missiles for the Royal Air Force.
Seismograph Service Limited and Seismograph Service Corporation
Paul joined Seismograph Service Limited (SSL) in 1969, working for several years on seismic crews in the UK and Oman. When SSL opened a data processing center in Oman, he was selected to work there, becoming its manager in 1973. During this time he was responsible for all of SSL's data processing of Omani data. Finding his team was unable to handle problems specific to local data, he taught himself Fortran programming and developed several specialized processing programs to solve them.
In 1974 Paul was transferred to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where he managed SSL's data processing center, processing data for several companies there and developing processes to deal with data from the high Andean Altiplano. In 1975 he was seconded to SSL's parent company, Seismograph Service Corporation (SSC), in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to develop geophysical and geological software for them. As a senior staff programmer, he was charged with developing innovative ways to store, map and display geophysical data. One product of this period was a novel method of drawing contour maps without gridding the data, thus avoiding the many artifacts that conventional machine-contouring programs suffer from to this day.
Union Pacific Resources Company
Paul was hired as a programming manager by Union Pacific Resources Company (UPRC) in 1985 to design and develop a new geological database and mapping system. He hired a crew of talented programmers, and by coordinating efforts between UPRC developers in Fort Worth, Houston and Denver, produced the requested system; it is still in use today. During this time he developed skills in VAX/VMS system management, network programming and management, and in project management with a geographically-dispersed team.
Schlumberger and Sabre
In 1994 Paul moved to Schlumberger's Austin Research Center, working on their Geoframe system, but in 1995 he moved back to Arlington, Texas, to be closer to his family, and took a job at Sabre. There, he developed methods for routinely transferring huge masses of data from Sabre's mainframe systems in Tulsa to Unix servers in Fort Worth. During this period he was asked to be the system administrator for these Unix systems, a task that required rapid assimilation of very complex material. He continued there until project completion in 1999.
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway
In 1999 Paul went to work for Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway in a small group that supported the Telecommunication Division's Network Control.