Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Autumn 2013 | Page 43
alumni news
profile
Mister Energy
by Ruby Thomas
Charged with advancing science and
shaping policy for the oil and natural gas
industries on an international scale,
David Curtiss ’92 doesn’t stay put in one
place for long.
During his first 15 months
as executive director of the American
Association of Petroleum Geologists
(AAPG), David Curtiss ’92 spent 214 nights
on the road. It got to the point where if you
asked him what he did for a living, he’d say,
“Sit on an airplane.”
From his base in Tulsa, David has
crisscrossed the globe to visit many of the
AAPG’s 38,000 members—geoscientists
focused on energy, working in government,
academia, and industry in 116 countries.
David steers the 80+ staff headquartered
in Tulsa as well as the AAPG teams in
Bogota, Dubai, London, Singapore, and
Washington, D.C. For a missionary kid,
the international scope of the work is a joy,
despite the never-ending travel itineraries.
David continues the work he began
as head of AAPG’s policy activities in
Washington, D.C. Through briefings
and one-on-one meetings, he educated
U.S. policy makers about energy and the
science and technology of oil and natural
gas exploration and production. As a
resource to Congress, he brought science
to bear in conversations about the energy
issues of the day, such as the potential
of shale gas and the use of hydraulic
fracturing to extract these resources in an
environmentally responsible way. Also, he
spent a lot of time informing policy makers
and the public on the central role that
oil and natural gas play in supplying the
world’s energy.
David got his start in policy work by
serving as a Congressional Science Fellow
from 2001 to 2002, working for then
Representative J. C. Watts, Jr., alongside
three other Wheaton graduates, Jon
Vandenheuvel ’91, Greg McCarthy ’91,
and James Smith ’92. These three, like
David, attended Wheaton during a time
when the geolo gy and environmental
science (GES) department was emerging
from near extinction.
In 2012 the GES department launched
their largest class ever—33 graduates;
in contrast, David’s class graduated just
six geology majors. He was among the
first group of students shepherded by Drs.
Jeffrey Greenberg and Stephen Moshier.
His time at Wheaton proved formative.
“I was forced to wrestle with issues such as
the age of the Earth and how to integrate
God’s role as Creator with scientific
observation and testing,” he says. “This
wrestling builds important skills that go
far beyond issues of faith and learning—it
forces you to see the big picture and how
to place whatever you are doing into its
larger context.”
In his role with the AAPG, his “big picture”
now includes the whole world, as energy
resources are required everywhere
to generate electricity, transportation,
Originally interested in political science, heating, cooling, food, water, and clothing.
David declared for geology at the end of “It is enormous,” David says of the oil
and natural gas industry. “The scale is
his freshman year. “The fact that we were
mind-boggling—and international. And
such a small department contributed
the energy we find and produce is the
greatly to our sense of camaraderie. A
geology major? We have that at Wheaton?” foundation of modern society.”
W H E A T O N 43