A digital trailblazer paves the way for others, creating a substantial impact and serving as a precursor to further digital innovation and value creation in the subsurface geoscience community.
At the Dig X Subsurface conference in Oslo this December, the Digital Trailblazer Award 2025 will celebrate such a pioneer.
We are happy to announce that David Wade, Researcher Geoscience Data & Analytics at Equinor, is one of this year’s nominees.
Wade graduated from the University of Durham and has since 2011 worked within Equinor’s IT Digital Research group, solving complex computing problems and exploring the frontiers of artificial intelligence in geoscience. His professional expertise spans Deep Learning, CUDA, and Python, and his creative mindset has led to several groundbreaking digital tools that have reshaped workflows and accelerated insight.
Wade has been integral in developing new in-house tools at Equinor, first and foremost DELI, a machine learning seismic interpretation tool, and CUILLIN, a drill cutting analysis tool. More recently, Wade and his colleagues have embarked on the development of the SCAMPI tool for identifying fossils in palynology slides, utilizing machine-assisted technology.
David has been described as the right man at the right time for SCAMPI, bringing experience from image analysis of drill cuttings just as high-resolution digital palynology slides became available. While many assumed AI image analysis in this field would follow the path of digital pathology, requiring vast, manually labeled datasets, Wade took a bold new direction – adopting self-supervised learning. It was a creative leap few thought possible, and its potential to revolutionize biostratigraphy will be presented by David at the conference.
Colleagues call him an exceptionally intelligent, generous, and humorous collaborator – an inventive problem-solver who combines deep technical knowledge with true curiosity. Beyond work, he is a dedicated father of a young family who loves hiking, skiing, orienteering, and kayaking.
Some also suspect that his great ability to tackle challenges and solve problems is rooted in his academic foundation in astrophysics because, as everyone knows, astrophysics is everything.
David Wade is worthy of the award for being at the forefront and pushing boundaries in an incredibly fast-moving field.