SINCE HIS YOUTH, Robert Stewart has sought to see below the surface of things as we know them. The son of a nurse and a member of Parliament, he grew up just north of Toronto, Canada, exploring mountains, forests and wilderness around Lake Superior. As a young man, he spent months working at a cancer institute in Toronto, building ultrasonic scanners to locate tumors inside patients’ bodies.

Eventually, he found that a career in geophysics married his outdoor interests with his technical pursuits. Today, Stewart is a professor of geophysics at the University of Houston, as well as the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Chair in Exploration Geophysics. Whether you are searching for hydrocarbons in a subduction zone or trying to locate unmarked graves in former plantations around Houston, Stewart is your man.

“We work with waves bouncing off anomalies,” he says. “You make a wave, it bounces off something, and you make a picture from how it’s bounced off.”

The same essential principle applies when mapping the inside of the body, searching for underground water, peering inside of volcanoes or peeling back the substrate layers of faraway planets — all pursuits of Stewart’s over the years. In every case, vibrations create echoes. With enough echoes, which scientists interpret via a field of computing called signal processing, a picture emerges. The echoes that have resonated through Stewart’s life stem from his early love of the outdoors and physical exploration.

Gaining a Global Vision

Family road trips to the Canadian Rockies as a child later helped inspire Stewart’s move west to Alberta, the so-called “Texas of Canada,” to intern at Chevron as a teen. He picked up technical mountain climbing and soon took a gap year to climb in the Himalayas and explore South and Southeast Asia.

“It was radically resetting for me,” he says. “At the time, I was a kind of philosophical hippie. When I got to India, there was horrific poverty and beautiful temples. In Kolkata, I had the chance to meet Mother Teresa. And then the Indian government detonated its first atomic bomb, with Canadian technology, while we were there.”

The world had shifted under the young man’s feet. He took his physics degree with a minor in mathematics from the University of Toronto and headed to Boston to pursue a geophysics Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he focused on earthquakes, resource exploration, rock physics and signal processing. He also embraced the culture of what he calls “geo people” — the sort of outdoorsy, camping, climbing, team players who, like Stewart, obsessed over the physics of rocks and earth.

“It gave us opportunities to travel the world,” he says. “I studied earthquakes in Peru. We worked inside the Soviet Union in semi-covert operations. It was exciting to be doing dam work, subsurface work, water, oil and gas.” He continues to meet up with a group of four other MIT gradschool classmates who also moved to Houston. Once a month, they get together — lunch at Kasra Persian Grill is routine — and hash out the problems of the world.

“The five of us have extremely different backgrounds,” he says. “Different religions, different geographies, different political views. But we all share a love of trying to get to what we perceive as the truth.”

The Future of Energy Exploration

Now deep into his career as a professor at UH — as a supervisor, he has graduated some 100 graduate students, for which he is enduringly proud — Stewart continues to probe the world around him.

Stewart is the leader of the UH-DGH Center for Hydrocarbon Exploration, which is a collaboration between UH and the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons — an arm of the Indian Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. In this role, he oversees a cohort of students who are sorting through expanses of data from around India to find undersea energy resources that could shape the future of the world’s most populous country. Stewart and his team are working to help the government and energy companies understand the geology of the Indian subcontinent and its boundaries to better grasp the potential for offshore fossil fuel production.

“It’s very graphic in my mind what our students and staff are doing that could be transformative to India,” Stewart says. “When I was a student in Kolkata, the main cooking source was cow dung pressed on the wall and burned at night to heat your food. The most noxious miasmas were the fogs in Kolkata.”

Decades after that visit, India has widely adopted coal; Stewart wants to see them produce electricity with cleaner fuel sources. One day, he believes, the future of energy will belong to fusion. “The sun knows that,” he says. “That’s what it does.”

Until then, he explores with an eye toward mitigating the downstream effects of the energy sources that fuel the present. Using fuel anywhere in the world can reverberate around the globe. When the full picture emerges, Stewart knows, it’s all happening on a single, interconnected planet with enduring mysteries beneath us, tantalizingly out of view.