Interviewer: Tyler Priest

Affiliation : University of Houston

George Vance grew up in Brooklyn, and from high school shipped off immediately to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. Vance would end up spending twenty years in the Coast Guard, the first half as a shipboard engineer—primarily on an icebreaker—and the second as a professor back at the Academy. Vance earned his doctorate while at the Academy, from the University of Rhode Island, focusing on modeling vessel behavior in ice. For three years, Vance was able to test scale models of icebreaker designs in a custom-built ice tank built by the Army Corps of Engineers. Vance soon retired from the Guard and took on with Mobil, in their Ice Engineering section, where he helped design the landmark Hibernia platform. Vance also served as Mobil’s designated representative in the DeepStar industry consortium. When Exxon and Mobil merged in 2000, Vance retired, having spent twenty years in the Guard and twenty at Mobil.