Daniel J. Soeder has been the director of the Energy Resources Initiative at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology in Rapid City, South Dakota since 2017. He brought to this position 25 years of experience as a research scientist for the federal government, beginning with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) on the Yucca Mountain Project in Nevada, where he coordinated USGS hydrologic and geologic fieldwork, and in the Mid-Atlantic region where he researched coastal hydrology, wetlands, water supply, and groundwater contamination, and for 3 years chaired the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee for the Delaware Estuary Program. He also spent seven years at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, West Virginia performing energy and environmental research on gas shale and other unconventional fossil energy resources. Prior to joining the USGS in 1991, Soeder spent a decade carrying out studies of the geology of unconventional natural gas resources at the Institute of Gas Technology (now GTI) in Chicago, and worked as a contractor for DOE in Morgantown from 1979 to 1981, collecting and characterizing drill cores on the Eastern Gas Shales Project. He has authored multiple reports and scientific papers on shale properties, including a special paper published by the Geological Society of America in 2017 chronicling the development of natural gas resources in the Marcellus Shale. He has also investigated and written about the impacts of shale gas development on the environment. Raised in Cleveland, Ohio he received a B.S. degree in geology from Cleveland State University in 1976, and an M.S. degree in geology from Bowling Green State University (Ohio) in 1978.