Leon Thomsen holds titles of Scientist for Delta Geophysics, Executive Advisor for KMS Technologies-KJT Enterprises Inc., and Visiting Scientist for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He holds a B.S. in geophysics from California Institute of Technology (Pasadena), and a Ph.D. in geophysics from Columbia University (New York). He held postdoctoral positions at Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris), International Business Machines (Palo Alto), and Caltech. He was Assistant, then Associate Professor at the State University of New York (Binghamton), with sabbatical positions at Goddard Institute for Space Studies (New York) and the Australian National University (Canberra).

Leon's industrial career began in 1980, at Amoco's famous research center in Tulsa, where he was the Amoco inventor of what we now call seismic AVO.

He led significant revisions to the exploration seismic paradigm, helping to establish the basic ideas of polar anisotropy and azimuthal anisotropy.

His 1986 paper, establishing the modern field of seismic anisotropy, is the single-most-cited paper in the history of Geophysics; a recent Google of the term ‘Thomsen parameter' returned over 600,000 hits. In 1995, he moved to Amoco's Worldwide Exploration Group in Houston, where his 1997 paper established the modern field of converted-wave exploration, defining such concepts as "C-waves", "registration", "gamma-effective", "diodic velocity", etc.

As Principal Geophysicist (and Senior Advisor, following the BP-Amoco merger), he had the opportunity to investigate unconventional topics in geophysics; this led him, beginning in 2002 to CSEM. Working together with KMST, BP acquired and processed the world's first successful at-scale tCSEM TM survey. In 2008, Leon retired from BP, and established Delta Geophysics.

Leon has served the Society of Exploration Geophysics as Chair of several committees, as Distinguished Lecturer, Distinguished Instructor, Vice-President, and President (2006-07). He holds the SEG's Fessenden Award, and the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences' Kapitsa Medal. He is an Honorary Member of the Geophysical Society of Houston, and of the European Association of Geoscientists, and a Foreign Member of the RNAS.

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