Dr. Robert Mellors currently serves as a Program Director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the U.S. Department of Energy. As a geophysicist, his areas of interests include geothermal energy, seismological monitoring, distributed acoustic sensing, and satellite radar.

Prior to joining ARPA-E, Dr. Mellors served on the faculty at San Diego State University, where he taught reflection seismic interpretation and computational geoscience, and then on the staff at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as an Associate Program Lead for Renewables and Deputy Group Leader for Seismology. Subsequently, he became a researcher at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and served as the director for a global seismic network.

Dr. Mellors is an author on over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, numerous abstracts, an open-source InSAR processing package, and has worked on or led multiple projects for the U.S. Department of Energy. In addition, he is a member of the Society of Exploration Geophysics and the Seismological Society of America.

Dr. Mellors earned his Ph. D in Seismology from Indiana University, M.S. in Geophysics from Cornell University, and undergraduate degree from Ohio State University.