Geophysical Laboratory Chief

A team of Scientists is just like a team of Professional Athletes: It needs a Coach to educate, motivate, lead, and focus its team members in pursuit of shared objectives.

As a Geophysical Laboratory Chief, you’re the Coach for a team of Geophysicists and Geologists who work together in a shared geophysical laboratory. Although your team isn’t trying to win a game, it nonetheless has a shared goal: conducting scientific research on the earth’s surface in order to detect the presence of natural resources below it.

Comprised mostly of Exploration Geologists, your team may work in a lab that’s owned by a university, a nonprofit organization, a research institute, a government agency, or a private enterprise, such as an oil company. Always, however, the lab’s purpose is applying physical techniques — for instance, seismic, gravitational, magnetic, electric, and electromagnetic — to measure the properties of rocks in search of underground oil, minerals, gas, and water.

Think of a lab as a company and a Geophysical Laboratory Chief as its CEO: Your job as the Geophysical Laboratory Chief is managing the lab’s people, projects, and procedures. That means it’s up to you to decide what research projects your lab will execute, who will execute them, and how they will be executed. You help plan those projects, you assign resources to them, and you direct the activities of those who are involved with them. Finally, when the projects are done, you supervise the compilation and communication of their findings.

Because exploration geology is all about exploring the earth’s crust, your lab is like a ship sailing to the New World, and you’re its Christopher Columbus!