[TO BE PREPARED ON COMPANY LETTERHEAD]
United States Department Homeland Security
United States Citizenship and Immigration Services
Re:
Dr. Gboyega Ayeni, Immigrant Visa Petition for Classification as an
Outstanding Researcher
Dear Sir or Madam:
I am delighted to write this letter in support of Dr. Gboyega Ayeni’s priority worker
immigration petition being filed by his employer, ExxonMobil Upstream Research
Company. Dr. Ayeni has made outstanding original contributions to several aspects
of seismic imaging and reservoir characterization.
By way of introduction, my name is Dr. Paul de Groot. I am the President and a cofounder of dGB Earth Sciences, a seismic interpretation software and service
company, with headquarters in Enschede, The Netherlands. I started my
professional career as a geoscientist with Shell where I worked ten years in various
technical and management positions in different parts of the world, including Africa,
Europe and the Middle East. Subsequently, I worked for four years as a Senior
Research Geophysicist at the Institute of Applied Geosciences in the Dutch
Organization for Applied Scientific Research, TNO. I co-founded dGB Earth Sciences
in 1995 and I have remained active in development and applications of OpendTect,
dGB's open source seismic interpretation system. OpendTect is widely used in the
energy industry and in the academia, with more than 100,000 unique downloads
since it was released. I have authored several papers covering a wide range of
geophysical topics and co-authored a patent on seismic object detection. I am a coauthor of book on Soft Computing techniques in the Oil Industry. I hold Masters
and PhD degrees in geophysics from Delft University of Technology, The
Netherlands. Given my background and my interactions with Dr Ayeni since 2006, I
believe that I am qualified to assess his international recognition and
scholarly/scientific contributions.
My assessment of Dr. Ayeni is based on our collaboration with him on a novel
reservoir characterization technology. As part of the research component of his
postgraduate program at the University of Leeds, Dr. Ayeni was employed as a
summer intern at dGB Earth Sciences, Enschede, The Netherlands. This provided an
opportunity for me to interact with and closely assess Dr. Ayeni’s outstanding
research capabilities in relation to others in the field. During his time at dGB Earth
Sciences, Dr. Ayeni collaborated with dGB geoscientists in the development, testing
and application of the HitCube, an innovative reservoir characterization technology.
Seismic reservoir characterization is essential in the effective development of
hydrocarbon reservoirs. This technology provides a way to define probable
properties of hydrocarbon reservoirs using information from sparsely situated wells.
With this information, petroleum geoscientists and engineers can more effective
plan, drill and develop hydrocarbon reservoirs. As a result of our collaboration with
Dr. Ayeni, we developed a more robust understanding of this technology and
identified several other applications that have since been implemented. This
technology has now been developed into an important tool to solve various
reservoir characterization problems. Aspects our work with Dr. Ayeni and our
subsequent developments of this technology have been presented at various
international conferences in Europe and in the US.
Dr. Ayeni has made several important contributions to some of the most important
aspects of our field. Dr. Ayeni’s innovative contributions are important because they
address some of the most difficult problems in seismic imaging. For example, Dr.
Ayeni’s, Dr. Ayeni collaborated with other authors to develop an innovative scheme
to stabilize full waveform inversion by incorporating prior information as a
preconditioner. Full waveform inversion is one of the most advanced tools in seismic
imaging and represents a major component of current advanced geophysical
research. Dr. Ayeni’s collaborative work on full-waveform inversion shows how
geologic information such as structural geologic dip can be used to constrain an
otherwise poorly-constrained inverse problem. This innovative method can ensure
that results from full waveform inversion are geologically plausible. Furthermore, in
his PhD dissertation at Stanford University, Dr. Ayeni also showed how structural
geological information and prior knowledge could be integrated in the linearized
inversion of time-lapse seismic datasets. It is recognized in our industry that in
order to solve many of the existing seismic imaging problems, especially those that
require some form of inversion technique, we must integrate information from
various sources. Dr. Ayeni’s work on full waveform inversion and time-lapse imaging
clearly demonstrate the advantage of such integration.
Dr. Ayeni’s enviable depth of understanding of various aspects of our discipline
provides him a unique perspective for an integrated approach to research and
development—a skill required to solve some of the most difficult existing problems
in our industry. Given Dr. Ayeni’s recognized expertise and his wide-ranging
accomplishments, I am confident that he has the aptitude and ingenuity to continue
to influence our field. Therefore, I strongly recommend your favorable consideration
of Dr. Ayeni’s immigrant petition as an outstanding researcher.
Sincerely,
Dr. Paul de Groot
President and co-Founder
dGB Earth Sciences
The Netherlands