Penny Patterson received her BA degree in geology at CU Boulder in 1976 and during her upper-division undergraduate years, she worked part-time at the U.S.G.S. as a Field Assistant mapping bedrock geology in Idaho. After receiving her MS degree in geology at CU in 1981, she began her career in the petroleum industry at Research Planning Institute, Inc., where she worked on stratigraphic and basin-analysis studies of hydrocarbon-bearing basins in the western U.S. In 1990, Penny obtained her Ph.D. degree in geology from CU Boulder and began her 28-year career at ExxonMobil. At ExxonMobil she conducted fieldwork and subsurface studies in international locations, including in Chad, Niger, Kuwait, Azerbaijan, Australia, China, and Russia as well as in U.S. locations of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Wyoming, and California. Through both her research studies on international and domestic petroleum systems and her teaching of sequence stratigraphy and petroleum geology courses at ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company, Penny became a corporate expert at ExxonMobil for exploration, development, and production of conventional and unconventional hydrocarbon resources. Upon retirement from ExxonMobil, she taught Petroleum Geology at CU Boulder. Recently, she formed Patterson Geoscience Group, LLC, which is a consulting company that focuses on geoscience studies of conventional and unconventional petroleum resources.