Professor Simon Lang is Professor of Practice - Energy Geoscience and Director of the Centre for Energy Geoscience in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Western Australia. He is a globally recognised sedimentologist and stratigrapher, recently honoured as the 4^th Australian National Geoscience Champion in 2024 by the Australian Geoscience Council, representing all eight Australian geoscience professional societies, in recognition of his “major contribution to Australian Geoscience through decades of work and research across government, industry and academia”.,

Simon was also the receipient of the Barry Goldstein Medal, 2024, for "Innovation, Collaboration & Communication in Geoscience" by the Petroleum Exploration Society of Australia (PESA), who previously had awarded him the PESA Distinguished Lecturer for 2010.

Simon has ~40 years of experience including regional geological mapping, sedimentology & stratigraphy research, petroleum and mineral exploration & development, and carbon dioxide sequestration. He started with the Geological Survey of Queensland (1979-92) working for the Palaeontology and Regional Mapping departments mapping large parts of central and northern Queensland, during which time he completed his BSc Honours and Phd at the University of Queensland. He then began his academic career as Lecturer of Sedimentology and Stratigraphy at Queensland University of Technology (1992-1999), before moving to the National Centre for Petroleum Geology & Geophysics as Associate Professor at the University of Adelaide, which later became the Australian School of Petroleum (1999-2005). His academic work focussed on sedimentology of modern and ancient depositional analogues, sequence and seismic stratigraphy, applications to reservoir characterization and basin analysis, and geo-sequestration (CO2CRC).

He joined industry to work for Woodside Energy as a co-ordinator and manager of Stratigraphy/Reservoir Analysis teams (2005-13) working on all their Australian and most of their international projects. He then moved across to Chevron Corporation (Energy Technology Company) in Houston, as a Senior Stratigrapher in the Seismic Geomorphology and Clastic Stratigraphy teams (2013-2015) where he worked as a global roaming geological consultant on numerous international projects. He returned to Perth as Geologic Services Manager & Stratigraphy Advisor (Perth) for Chevron Australia (2015-18). 

He returned to academe under the "Inspire" program as a professor of practice, and as Director to rebuild the Centre for Energy Geoscience within the School of Earth Sciences, University of Western Australia. He teaches mostly postgraduates and leads research consortia on quantitative seismic stratigraphy (QSS) and reservoir analogues (RA) funded by national and international industry partners (now in the next phase - Quantitative Reservoir Analogues "QRA".

Simon has supervised numerous graduate students at QUT, University of Adelaide and University of Western Australia, published >100 papers and geological maps, run numerous field courses in Australia and SE Asia, and taught industry classes on reservoir characterization in Australia, Germany, Indonesia, India, Japan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Russia, Thailand, UK, & USA.