Laurence R. Bentley *90

Larry died of complications of cancer March 22, 2023, in Calgary, Canada.

He was born Feb. 24, 1950, in Burbank, Calif. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Hamilton and a master of science degree at the University of Hawaii. He received his Ph.D. in civil engineering and operations research from Princeton in 1990, working on numerical modeling of groundwater flow and transport, supervised by George Pinder.

Larry joined the Department of Geology and Geophysics of the University of Calgary, where he remained until he retired as a full professor in 2017. He held a previous position at the University of Vermont.

Larry’s research strength was founded on rigorous training in both geophysics and hydrogeology. This allowed him to pioneer the new research field combining near-surface geophysics with hydrogeology. He made contributions in revealing new hydrogeological processes in various environments, including the Canadian prairies, alpine headwater of the Rocky Mountains, and permafrost peatlands in the Northwest Territories. Larry also contributed to the development of advanced geostatistical methods to characterize complex heterogeneous aquifers, such as Markov statistics and simulated annealing and object-based stochastic models.

Larry is survived by his wife, Kate; his children, Alistair, Meghan, Ian, and Josh; and his grandson, Avra.

Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.