Howard Neal retired from Schlumberger Ltd. after a 23-year career in which he served in several leadership positions.  He was Vice President of Engineering at the Schlumberger Austin Systems Center and was responsible for developing hardware and software solutions for oilfield data acquisition and interpretation systems.  He also served as Vice President of Marketing at the Wireline, Testing, and Anadrill Division of Schlumberger, located in New York.

He was Vice President of Product Development at the GeoQuest Division of Schlumberger in Houston. This role included both Marketing (Product Definition) as well as the development of products.  In this role, Mr. Neal led a team of developers located in 5 centers worldwide developing applications in the geoscience, reservoir, data management, and production domains for oil and gas companies.  The software technologies were extremely broad and included: application development frameworks, 3D visualization and interpretation, data management applications build on relational databases, and simulation applications.

Prior to his career at Schlumberger, Mr. Neal also worked for 8 years at IBM in Austin where he primarily focused on advanced display technologies.  

Following his retirement, Mr. Neal taught several courses as an adjunct professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Texas. He received the Student Engineering Council Teaching Award in March, 2003. He served for many years on the External Advisory Committee for the ECE Department and continues to serve on the External Advisory Board for the Cockrell School of Engineering.

Mr. Neal graduated from The University of Texas with Bachelor of Science with Highest Honors and Master of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering. Mr. Neal is a Registered Professional Engineer (inactive) in the State of Texas.