Dan Soeder is the new Energy Resources Initiative director at South Dakota School of Mines & Technology in Rapid City. He was previously a research scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, West Virginia, from 2009 to 2017, where his focus was on gas shale. He came to DOE with 18 years of experience as a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in the Mid-Atlantic region and on the Yucca Mountain Project. Prior to that, he spent a decade performing production research on tight sandstone and shale at the Gas Technology Institute in Chicago, and two years as a DOE contractor on the Eastern Gas Shales Project, where he recovered and characterized shale drill core. He holds BS and MS degrees in geology from Cleveland State University and Bowling Green State University in Ohio.