Rowan Cockett

I am interested in the intersection of education, entrepreneurship, and academia, and seeing what happens when you make powerful scientific modeling, visualization and collaboration tools accessible through the web. (Read more)

Education
  • Supervisor: Dr. Eldad Haber
  • Thesis: "A framework for geophysical inversions with application to vadose zone parameter estimation"
  • Awarded Gilles Brassard Doctoral Prize for Interdisciplinary Research
  • Vanier Scholar
  • Killam Laureate
  • Topics: Geophysical Inversion, Fluid Flow, Optimization, Multi-Physics Simulations
  • Supervisor: Dr. Adam Pidlisecky
  • Thesis: "Two approaches to improving the utility of electrical conductivity in time varying porous media"
  • Awarded "Best Undergraduate Thesis" in the Geoscience Department
Experience
  • Oversaw development initiatives and strategy for Seequent's cloud and enterprise products for collaboration, visualization and version control in geoscience.
  • Led the cloud team at Seequent, directly hiring and managing a team of twelve with a remote team of five people. Worked on lfview.com, a 3D visualization and communication tool for geoscience data that seamlessly hooks up to Seequent's desktop products and enables partnerships through open APIs and client libraries. Curated and developed Seequent's platform, cloud and visualization strategies. Worked with standards bodies to introduce and develop the Open Mining Format (omf). Developed, pitched and won accelerated development contracts.
  • The cloud team at Seequent championed agile philosophy and methodologies, test driven development, blameless dev-ops culture, inner-sourcing culture, and continuous delivery of software. We deployed software to production on-demand multiple times a week without down-time and oversaw significant shifts/migrations in our architecture as we grew, improved and incorporated leading practices and technology.
  • Development of Steno3D, a technical communication solution for the geoscience industry
  • Aranz Geo rebranded and consolidated to become Seequent
  • Co-founded and developed a computational environment for collaborative scientific writing that hosts multiple scientific resources for geophysics.
  • Technical communication using large scale 3D scientific visualization and interactive media
  • Development of visual application framework for interactive interrogation of data and functions
  • Lead a 5 person software team: front-end web development, database development, 3D graphics, scientific algorithm research & development, external consultants.
  • Awarded development grant from Alberta Innovates Technology Futures for "The Geo-sandbox: Accelerating training of geoscience professionals through immersive web-based exploration tools."
  • Deployment of software solutions in oil & gas training programs, university classrooms, academic research labs.
  • All other duties of a startup founder: visioning, pitching, inspiring, leading.
  • Successful exit to ARANZ Geo Limited.
  • An open source Python package for simulation and gradient based parameter estimation in geophysical applications. SimPEG is a growing community of geoscientists building an open foundation for geophysics. The framework provides a collection of geophysical simulation and inversion tools that are built in a consistent framework and finite volume tools that work across many different discretizations and dimensions.
  • Designed and programmed visualization tools to aid in interpretation of geophysical data
  • Taught and marked two laboratory section of 20-30 students introductory geophysics
  • Taught a laboratory section of 25 students introductory physical hydrogeology
  • Concept design and creation of visualization software for teaching and learning introductory geology
  • Development, design, and programming, of a web-based 3D visualization tool for structural geology
  • Used across the world in introductory and structural geology classes
  • Awarded "Innovative Dissemination of Research Award" from the UBC Library in 2013
  • Awarded "Outstanding Student Paper Award" for geoscience education at AGU 2010 Annual Meeting
  • More than 350 000 geoscience students and teachers have created their own geologic block models
  • Geophysical research on the correlation between electrical resistivity and sediment parameters
  • Hydrogeophysical probe construction and design to create near-surface automated probes that collect high resolution time-lapse electrical resistivity tomography data
Awards