During the summer, three new research scientists have joined the research department SAND; Heidi Kjønsberg, Daniel Barker, and Audun Sektnan.

Heidi Kjønsberg holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Oslo, specializing in quantum effects in low dimensional systems. After two years as a post-doc in theoretical condensed matter physics in the US, she joined the research department of Telenor in Oslo in 2000. There she worked, among other things, on internet protocols and security.

She left Telenor in 2005 and joined the SAND department at NR. During the period 2005 – 2012 she worked on topics related to seismic inversion, multipoint algorithms, fault seal modeling, and CO₂ storage. In 2012 she left NR, and during the period 2012-2017 she was a transport analysts in NSB, the Norwegian national railway operator.

She is now back at NR, and presently works on methods related to seismic inversion.

Daniel Barker holds a Master ’s degree in Industrial Mathematics  and a Ph.D. degree in Applied Geophysics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The latter was done in collaboration with Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS), on the topic of mathematical modelling of clustered air guns (seismic sources). He continued working on seismic source related topics with PGS after finishing the Ph.D, leading development of marines source modelling in the Nucleus+ software package and developing new methods for calibration and use of nearfield hydrophone data in the field.

At NR, Daniels initial work will be developing software and methods related to inversion from and horizon detection in seismic data.

Audun Sektnan has a Master’s degree in Industrial Mathematics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), with further specialization in Statistics. His Master’s thesis was about exact statistical inference in parametric models.

At NR, his work will primarily be related to modelling geological surfaces.