March 3, 2025
Dear Jackson School Community,
I am very pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Lorena Moscardelli to be the new Director of the Bureau of Economic Geology and State Geologist of Texas. Moscardelli will become the Bureau’s ninth Director, and the first woman to serve in the Director role, when she steps into the leadership position on March 17, 2025.
No stranger to the Bureau, Moscardelli arrived at the Jackson School of Geosciences in 2003 for her Ph.D. studies on submarine landslide deposits with research mentor Lesli Wood. After completing her Ph.D., she remained at the Bureau as a researcher, co-founding the Quantitative Clastics Laboratory (QCL), now a longstanding Industry Affiliates Partnership (IAP). In 2013, she joined the Norwegian energy company Statoil/Equinor, where she held assignments in research, exploration, production and personnel development. She was hired back to the Bureau in 2021 to serve as Program Director for the State of Texas Advanced Resource Recovery program (STARR), the Bureau’s flagship state program to increase the productivity and profitability of Texas resources. She recently completed executive development education at the Wharton School of Business.
Moscardelli has made significant research contributions in the area of deep-water submarine landslide deposits, publishing results seminal to our understanding of seafloor landslide phenomena. Her work has been used to condition models for the tsunamigenic impacts of seafloor landslides, to examine seafloor failure risk along continental margins, and to examine the role of mass failures in basin form and fill. She expanded her research to explore the influence of underlying structural controls on continental margin evolution, developing new models for mixed carbonate-siliciclastic systems and their interactions with deep-water settings, such as the eastern offshore region of Nova Scotia. The latter study was recognized by the Canadian Energy Geoscience Association in 2020 with the Medal of Merit for the best paper related to Canadian petroleum geology published that year. Since her return to the Bureau, Moscardelli has pivoted her research to address the energy transition, mentoring many early career researchers on integrated geoscience, engineering, and techno-economic analysis of the potential for hydrogen storage in subsurface salt caverns. She has worked to improve our understanding of the entire value chain of emerging energy systems.
Dr. Moscardelli’s vision for the Bureau is to maintain its commitment to advancing research at the intersection of energy, environment and economics, and adopt its current “Texas Imperative” initiative to markedly increase the impact of its work on the State of Texas. She is committed to re-engaging the Bureau as a center of student learning, and seeks to ensure that Jackson School students have a path to learning disciplines relevant to industry. Lorena has a deep commitment to the Bureau and its mission, and I have every confidence that she will be a strong and successful leader.
Interim Director Mark Shuster will return to his role as deputy director when Moscardelli assumes leadership. The Jackson School is extremely grateful to Dr. Shuster for serving so selflessly in this role – and for much longer than originally expected. Over this period, he led the development of the Bureau’s “Texas Imperative” strategic plan to deliver impactful and accessible research to the state in its role as the Texas geological survey, with new resources studies on water systems and drought, economic mineral resources, helium and native hydrogen gas studies, and geothermal energy. And he kept a steady hand on the wheel as we added positions in TexNet, developed the effectiveness of new instrumentation and oversaw the combination of several IAPs for efficiency and effective delivery of research results. I know you will all join me in giving Mark a hearty and heartfelt, “Thank-you!”
Three cheers and welcome to Lorena!
Claudia
