Awards & Scholarships

Joseph A. Burkhardt was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1928. After serving two years in the U. S. Navy, he studied at Auburn University and graduated in 1951 with honors, receiving a B.S. in Engineering Physics. He then joined the Production Research Division of the Humble Oil & Refining Co. in Houston, Texas. He is now a senior research engineer of the Humble Company, working on hydraulic fracturing of earth strata.

Mr. Burkhardt's initial work was in the fields of fluid mechanics, oil recovery, and formation evaluation. While working in these areas, he was an instructor on the effects of capillarity on oil accumulation and production in the Company's Reservoir Engineering School. In 1958 he presented some of the results of his work on formation evaluation at the Fall Meeting of the Society of Petroleum Engineers of AIME.