Mr Oliver Whelehan, Umetrics

Oliver Whelehan graduated from the University of Bath in 1980 with an honours degree in Statistics. For the next five years he worked in agricultural research at the Food Research Institute near Bristol, specialising in the analysis of sensory data, animal growth studies and carcass hygiene.

In 1986 he joined BP Research at Sunbury-on-Thames where he provided a statistical consultancy service to scientists and business personnel alike. During this time he developed a course on experimental design for non-statisticians which was run on a regular basis.

In 1990, he was seconded to a task force investigating the causes of stuck pipe which was an extremely costly problem associated with drilling complex wells. Shortly afterwards he was seconded to BP Exploration's Drilling Technology Group in Aberdeen where he developed novel methods for forecasting well times and costs.

In 1994 he wrote a course on quantitative risk analysis for drilling and completions engineers which was run in various drilling centres around the world. In June 1999 he joined Umetrics, becoming Managing Director soon afterwards. He specialises in design of experiments and multivariate analysis and is a regular lecturer on Umetrics' courses.