4 November 2025—Bill Curry grew up in Alberta, Canada, in what he calls “the home of the Canadian energy industry,” so the idea of exploring a career in the earth sciences came early to him.
“My favorite subjects were math and physics, which drew me to geophysics,” Curry explained. “In the 1990s, geophysics in Alberta usually meant reflection seismology for energy exploration, which is the path I went down.”
The path has led to a career spent exclusively in industry, but Curry’s focus has always been research, he said.
In graduate school, he studied seismic imaging and signal processing and spent his early career developing methods for data regularization, interferometry and imaging for active-source reflection seismology.
“I realized during my first internship at a small oil company that I was as interested in how algorithms work as much as in the results they generated,” Curry said. “I’ve had a couple of small stops outside of research during my career but was happy to get back to learning about and hopefully developing new things.”
For the past five years, Curry has been the technical team lead for injection and seismicity research at ExxonMobil. “Since it’s a multidisciplinary field with geomechanics, seismology, reservoir engineering, well engineering, geology and civil engineering, I try to help where I can as a jack-of-all-trades,” he noted.
As part of ExxonMobil’s research organization, Curry and his colleagues are “grouped into teams tied to functional business lines,” he explained. His team is part of upstream unconventional resources technology development, and includes people working on produced water management, hydraulic fracturing modeling and methane detection, among other questions.
“Our teams work together to solve a variety of complex problems to help meet the world’s energy needs, each of which can last from a few months to a few years,” Curry said.
It’s a job that requires keeping up with new technologies and new research findings, which Curry called the “most Sisyphean part of the job.”
“I use some common tools to get alerts on publications, and of course rely on BSSA, SRL, and TSR, but my reading list is growing faster than I can get through it.” he acknowledged. “A few of us get together to view classes on topics we missed in graduate school, like Earthscope’s InSAR classes. Programming seems like it’s easiest to stay on top of, with many online options.”
Although Curry has spent his career in industry, his conversations with friends in academia and government agencies have shed light on some key differences in their working lives. Instead of writing grant applications, he and his colleagues use an internal funding process. And there are opportunities to teach within industry, but fewer than in academia.
“Industry has opportunities to work with people with diverse technical backgrounds, and the work is more applied and tied to very tangible goals,” he said. “There are likely to be more bumps in a career tied to a commodity, although I don’t envy the tenure process!”
Since shifting his focus to seismicity, Curry said, “I’ve been amazed with how open and available data and algorithms are.” He hopes in the future “to contribute to these community efforts beyond the Raspberry Shake seismometer in the corner of my house.”
SSA At Work is a monthly column that follows the careers of SSA members. For the full list of issues, head to our At Work page.