2016 Distinguished Alumnus Eric Ziegel

Eric R. Ziegel

BA ’67 Mathematics, Miami University
MS ’71 Applied Statistics, Purdue University

Eric Ziegel is an adjunct graduate professor in the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M and a consulting data analyst and modeler currently working three days per week in Technology and Innovation for Marathon Oil Company in Houston, Texas. Eric retired in April, 2014 from a 45-year career as an industrial statistician with BP and Amoco. He began his career as an intern with Amoco during his graduate school days at Purdue. During his career he worked across all areas of the oil and gas business:  petrochemicals, plastic products, refining, lubricants, marketing, exploration, drilling, production, and pipelines. Eric was involved externally in engagements with a number of government agencies and in various cooperative programs with other fuel companies and vehicle manufacturers. Most of his industry assignments were with technology departments. He was co-developer of BP’s data sciences technology program in his final position with Upstream Technology. 

Mr. Ziegel has been active as a professional in both statistics and petroleum engineering. He has been a Fellow of the American Statistical Association since 1989. He has organized several conference technical programs, including the ASA Annual Meeting, and has been active on several major committees. He was Book Reviews Editor for the journal Technometrics for 22 years. His service was honored with an annual award in his name. More recently Eric has been active again in organizing technical programs with the Data-Driven Analytics Section of the Society of Petroleum Engineers and has had numerous papers at SPE conferences.

Eric has three U.S. Patents for solving different petroleum engineering problems using data-driven models.

Eric has an MS in Applied Statistics from Purdue in 1971 and a BA in Mathematics from Miami University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.