Rowan's Story

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.

I started creating geoscience visualization software as an undergraduate when I saw many of my peers struggling with three dimensional intuition. After sharing my initial visualizations with my peers, it was clear that I had stumbled upon an extremely effective teaching method. I took a year off after my undergrad in geology to re-write my Matlab code for the web and posted on a single blog and promptly started graduate school.

Entrepreneurship 1.0¶

With Visible Geology out in the world, I started getting contacted by textbook companies and oil and gas professionals. Since launching in 2011, over 350,000 people have used Visible Geology and they create over 30,000 geologic models a month! This idea was bigger than I had first thought and after watching a Ted Talk I was convinced I should start a company.

I co-founded 3point Science in 2013 with Adam Pidlisecky and Tara Moran where we built web-based visualization software for the geoscience industry. We experimented in three different industries, built things, hired people, launched websites, wrote grants, got rejected, pivoted, bootstrapped, launched, and pitched visions of the future. I was also a full-time PhD student. It was crazy. In 2015, we ran an interactive presentation for a mining symposium and caught the eye of a number of companies, including Aranz Geo, who saw the web as the natural next step for their business.

3point Science was acquired by Seequent (formerly Aranz Geo) in March 2016, and I remained on as the CTO; helping to start the Calgary office of the company. Seequent is a global geoscience software company and in 2017 they were making desktop software — my team was put in charge of transforming their desktop products (primarily Leapfrog 3D) with online collaboration, web-based 3D visualization, and version control, the products and technologies I worked on became Seequent Central. I ran the cloud platform team for four years as the VP of Cloud Architecture, reporting directly to the CEO; Seequent sold in 2021 for $1.05B. Selling my first company, building & leading global teams, and creating beautifully designed, technically outstanding products was a fantastic experience.

Education¶

Undergraduate¶

My undergraduate degree is in applied and environmental geology from the University of Calgary. I completed an honors thesis in my final year under the supervision of Adam Pidlisecky. I had been working with Adam on building some electrical conductivity probes designed for a managed aquifer recharge pond in California. My thesis, awarded Best Undergrad Geoscience Thesis, analyzed some of the geophysics data from the pond and interrogated a pore-scale numerical model.

Graduate¶

I took a year off after undergrad to travel and launch Visible Geology on the web and then in 2012 started a masters degree in Geophysics with Eldad Haber at the University of British Columbia. I transferred from a masters to a doctorate program in 2013. This is also when I decided that I had copious amounts of free time, and should probably start a company. This fixed the free time problem. Research, code, attend conferences, write, present, open-science-ify, run a conference, burnout, rally, publish, move to Calgary, burnout, rally, dissertate. In 2017, I finished my PhD. My research was on a numerical framework aimed at increasing quantitative communication in the geosciences. This framework has been developed through my studies on electromagnetics, subsurface flow, and structural geology. Much of my research is accessible through an open-source software initiative for simulations and parameter estimation in geophysics (SimPEG).

Dreams¶

SimPEG is an experiment in building a community around open-source geoscience tools that are focused on multi-physics, multi-data-type inversions and simulations. We have only barely scratched the surface. A big part of moving this forward requires educational materials, so, I have been involved in supporting an effort to create reproducible, modular and interactive educational materials. This is an experiment in collaboration and writing while trying to poke at ideas in scientific publishing. I am working introspectively at the moment, and keeping things small - just playing around with how to structure my website.