Tad Ulyrich - 2013
CSEG Medal Recipient Tad Ulyrich
Tadeusz Jan Ulrych was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1935. He obtained a B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering at London University. After a year working in ultrasonics he moved to Canada where he got a job working with Don Russell in his laboratory at the University of Toronto. He then moved to Vancouver where he received both his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees (1961 and 1963) at the University of British Columbia in the study of lead isotopes. His first academic position was as Assistant Professor at the University of Western Ontario. Following a NSERC Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Oxford University and at the Bernard Price Institute of Geophysics at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, Tad joined the University of British Columbia where he taught geophysics until retirement in 2000, becoming professor emeritus. He has been an Invited Professor at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, the University of Kyoto and OPERA, University of Pau. Tad has educated and mentored two (perhaps three) generations of geophysicists who today occupy positions in academia and industry.
Technically, Tad is perhaps best known for his work on maximum entropy spectral estimation, homomorphic deconvolution, bandwidth extension, minimum entropy deconvolution, non-white processes, eigen image and rank-reduction filtering, sparseness in multichannel signal processing ... Along with the fundamentals of time series analysis these topics were the highlights of his famous graduate course at UBC – “514”. In addition to his many papers he has written a book (with M. Sacchi). Tad has also been active in the SEG in various capacities:
- SEG Translation committee
- SEG Honorary Membership 2004
- SEG Distinguished Lecturer 2008.
Those who have met Tad will have appreciated his remarkable charisma, generosity and humour. For his many and diverse contributions to geophysics research and education in Canada and around the world, we award Tad the CSEG Medal.
