UL Lafayette AAPG IBA team wins regional first and international second place

Congratulations to Myllah Brown, Anna-Sophia Henry, Ashley Mindt, Caitlyn Mullis, and Amadeo Suazo on winning 1st place in the USA/Canada Region and 2nd in the world for this year’s AAPG Imperial Barrel Award (IBA) Program. The IBA Program is the premier global energy competition for geoscience students, with this year’s team orgabnized by faculty mentor, Dr. Rui Zhang.

The competition provides a rigorous two-month period for the team to analyze a real-world dataset for a basin's hydrocarbon potential, and then they pitch their exploration recommendations to a panel of industry experts. This year’s global competition was held at the headquarters of Murphy Oil Corporation during the International Meeting for Applied Geoscience and Energy (IMAGE) in Houston, TX.

Our students continue to show that the School of Geosciences is home to some of the brightest up-and-coming scientific minds in the world and we could not be more proud of their success!

We also give huge thanks to the team’s industry mentors Mary Broussard (MS Geology, 1995) and Brian Brennan, whose professional insights helped shape the team's winning exploration strategy!