My research group, the Stanford Exploration Project (SEP) is the first geophysical research consortium funded by the oil and gas industry, and demonstrates oil companies' consistent interest for developing new imaging methods. As of today, SEP is currently supported by approximately 20 energy companies involved in hydrocarbon exploration.

SEP was founded in 1973 by Jon F. Claerbout, the Cecil Green Professor Emeritus of Geophysics at Stanford University. Claerbourt has been a leading geophysicist since the later half of the 20th Century, and pioneered the use of computers in processing and filtering seismic exploration data, eventually developing the field of time series analysis and seismic wave propagation. Over the years, Claerbout has been a doctoral advisor of many influential geophysicists who joined SEP such as Dave Hale, John Etgen, Biondo Biondi, and Paul Sava. In addition, most of his highly-impactful geophysics books can be downloaded for free from his website.

SEP director Biondo L. Biondi is also the Barney and Estelle Professor of Geophysics at Stanford University and currently serves as the Geophysics Department Chair. He graduated from Politecnico di Milano in 1984 and received an MSc (1988) and a Ph.D. (1990) in Geophysics from Stanford. He has made contributions on several aspects of seismic imaging, ranging from velocity estimation to parallel algorithms for seismic migration. Since the early nineties he has been at the forefront of the development of wave-equation imaging and inversion methods such as wave-equation migration velocity analysis (WEMVA) and tomographic full waveform inversion (TFWI).