For more than 50 years, Ben has been an all-around, all-purpose geophysicist excelling in many disciplines and pursuing multiple careers. He is at home in field data acquisition as well as in seismic data processing and interpretation.
     After graduating from North Texas University with a degree in mathematics, he joined Geophysical Service Inc. in 1948 as a first computer on a seismic crew (at a time when a computer was a person not a machine). During his 33 years with GSI, he rose through the ranks and became chief geophysicist for the Western Hemisphere and then chief geophysicist for worldwide marine operations.
     He worked for ARCO for several years as a senior geophysicist responsible for solving problems in difficult areas. He joined Digicon in 1980 to become chief geophysicist and director of research. In recent years, he has worked as a consultant on special
     exploration problems in various places in the world.

     In bestowing this award, the Honors and Awards Committee cites Ben's work, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with air-gun technology: the design of tuned air-gun arrays to minimize bubble oscillations, to increase bandwidth of the air-gun pulse, and to
     increase data resolution with depth. His efforts to educate the geophysical industry through technical papers, seminars, and presentations at both local and international conferences provided the framework from which the industry accelerated the switch from using explosive sources for offshore seismic work to using the environmentally friendly air gun.
     In the middle 1960s, Ben, in collaboration with Roy Johnston, conducted many studies and experiments with a pneumatic acoustical device which, when used as a marine seismic source, was called an air gun. Ben presented a landmark paper at the EAEG meeting in 1967 (and published in Geophysical Prospecting in 1968) which dealt with pneumatic acoustical energy sources (air guns) as an alternative to dynamite. He introduced the idea of designing a source with a frequency spectrum which was tailored to fit the requirements of a specific area.
     In 1973, he coauthored a paper with Johnston that described how to design an air-gun system. To my knowledge, this was the first published paper that proposed using several sizes of guns to control the wavelet output. This paper described how to use air-gun size, coalesced guns, and the number of independent guns in an array to get a particular result. The work done by Ben and his associates in developing an understanding of air-gun technology and in implementing the system in production use launched the application of air-gun technology for marine data acquisition. From the early 1970s to the present, air-gun tuned arrays have been the leading source for marine seismic operations.
     Ben's contribution neither began nor ended with air-gun development. He was also part of a core group that helped the geophysical industry move from analog to digital systems. He carried out innovative work in several aspects of signal processing. In 1965, he coauthored a paper (with Schneider and Prince) titled "A new data processing technique for multiple attenuation exploiting differential normal moveout" about a method for attenuating multiple reflections.
     Ben was also a leader in the introduction of 3-D technology in both land and marine seismic surveys. He gave several presentations in the early 1970s which represent some of the first 3-D case histories. With coauthors Marion Bone and Ed Tegland, he presented a paper at the 1975 SEG Annual Meeting on the idea of using horizontal slices through a cube of 3-D seismic data as a new way to interpret the information. Subsequent publication of this material was honored as the Best Paper in Geophysics in 1983.
     Ben freely contributed his talents to many professional activities. He was a prolific generator of technical papers on air-gun systems, on 3-D seismic applications (particularly focused around marine exploration), and on various aspects of other marine data acquisition. These papers were presented at international, national, and regional geophysical meetings. He served SEG as Vice-President of the SEG Executive Committee (1977-78), Associate Editor of Interpretation (1971) for Geophysics, and a member of the Technical Standards Committee for several years. He served as president of the Dallas Geophysical Society (which has named him an Honorary Member).
     Ben has had a full, versatile, and very successful career over the last 50 years and one that is still ongoing. Ben and I were peers, and, fortunately for me, we were working associates over much of that time. I congratulate him on this well-deserved award.

     Robert J. Graebner