Faculty

Dr. Hanson leads the UNLV "Thermal Anomalies Around Salt" consortium. He is a basin analyst and petroleum geochemist who focuses on extensional basins, and petroleum generation and migration in basins that have mobile salt structures. Prior to becoming a faculty member at UNLV in 2000, he gained valuable experience in exploration and production at Mobil and Texaco.

Brett Perry is a first semester master's student working under Andrew Hanson. Brett grew up in the Las Vegas area and completed his BS in Geoscience at UNLV in 2012. His master's research focuses on the effects that salt diapirs have on thermal maturity, cementation, or other diagenetic changes of adjacent stratigraphy within the Lusitania Basin. Additional research interests include basin modeling and deep water depositional systems.

Tim Bright
UNLV Geoscience Department

Tim Bright is a senior geology major working with the STAR group. Tim grew up in Georgia and holds a B.S. degree in Journalism but realized that he want to be a geologist and so returned to school. Tim has been helping with a pilot project that is testing whether we can use in situ temperature probes placed in shallowly drilled holes in sandstones (~1.3 meter deep, ~2cm diameter) near salt bodies.

Nick Downs worked with Andrew Hanson's UNLV Salt Consortium. He grew up in Doha, Qatar and completed his BS at Duke University in 2009. His master's thesis focused on the effects that salt diapirs have on the thermal maturity of surrounding sediments in the southern Pyrenees, Spain.