Rate My Professor Boris Gurevich

Professor Boris Gurevich is a John Curtin Distinguished Professor of Geophysics at Curtin University in the Faculty of Science and Engineering, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences. He serves as Director of the Centre for Exploration Geophysics and Director of the Curtin Reservoir Geophysics Consortium. Boris obtained his MSc at Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1981 and began his career at the Moscow Institute of Geosystems, where his early work included numerical analysis of NMR signals, application of pattern recognition to direct detection of hydrocarbons from seismic reflection data, and poroelasticity. His PhD thesis in 1988 focused on quantification of dispersion and attenuation due to mesoscopic flow in thinly-layered poroelastic systems. In the 1990s, after visiting research appointments at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, Birkbeck College, and Elf Geoscience Research Centre in London, he joined the Geophysical Institute of Israel, combining poroelasticity with multi-focusing imaging. In 2001, he was appointed Professor of Geophysics at Curtin University under a joint appointment with CSIRO. There, his research expanded into rock physics topics such as effective stress laws, stress dependency of rock properties, and solid/fluid layered systems. He was Head of the Department of Exploration Geophysics from 2010 to 2015 and has directed the Curtin Reservoir Geophysics Consortium since 2004. He founded Curtin’s rock physics laboratory.

Gurevich's research specializations include wave-induced fluid flow in systems like patchy saturation, flow between pores and fractures, squirt flow, and heavy oil rocks; seismic data processing; time-lapse analysis; azimuthal anisotropy estimation from vertical seismic profiles; and modeling seismic time-lapse responses of CO₂ injected into reservoir rock. His contributions have advanced exploration and monitoring of oil, gas, groundwater, and CO₂ storage. He received the Society of Exploration Geophysicists Reginald Fessenden Award in 2021 for major contributions to exploration geophysics, was SEG Honorary Lecturer for the Asia-Pacific Region in 2019, and was awarded the John Curtin Distinguished Professor title in 2019, renewed for a subsequent five-year period. A Fellow of the Institute of Physics, he has served on editorial boards of Geophysics, Journal of Seismic Exploration, and Wave Motion, authoring over 100 journal publications. Key publications include "Poroelasticity: Seismic wave attenuation and dispersion resulting from wave-induced flow in porous rocks—A review" (2010), "A simple model for squirt-flow dispersion and attenuation in fluid-saturated granular rocks" (2010), "Velocity and attenuation of elastic waves in finely layered porous rocks" (1995), "Elastic properties of saturated porous rocks with aligned fractures" (2003), and "A model for P-wave attenuation and dispersion in a porous medium permeated by aligned fractures" (2005).