For the last fifteen years Colin has been active as a sculptor. In addition to having his own studio, he works with the Santa Fe Community College heavy sculpture group producing welded steel and fluorescent Plexiglas sculptures.

His pieces are in a wide variety of private collections at the following locations: Venice Beach, California, Albuquerque, New Mexico;   Fort Worth, Texas;   Santa Fe, New Mexico;   St. Louis, Missouri;   Jemez Springs, New Mexico;   Pacific Palisades, California;   Tulsa, Oklahoma;   Santa Barbara, California;   Arkansas;   Cincinnati, Ohio;   Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Colin retired as a geology professor in 2004, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There he joined the Santa Fe writers group and used his experience of academia to write four murder mysteries set in a fictitious New Mexico university. Not surprisingly his protagonist is a geologist.

Colin Barker was born in Plymouth, England and attended Devonport High School. He was the Beresford-Hope scholar at New College, Oxford where he completed his bachelor’s degree in chemistry. He specialized in geochemistry and moved into the geology department to do his doctorate. After graduation in 1965 he emigrated to the U.S. with his wife Yvonne and their two sons, Ashley and Conan.

Colin is McMan Professor (Emeritus) and a past Chairman of the Geosciences Department at the University of Tulsa. He is a research consultant in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Dr. Barker was formerly with Exxon Production Research in Houston, Texas and has over 35 year’s experience in organic geochemistry including being a consultant to several major petroleum companies and an international lecturer for OGCI/PetroSkills.He has been associate editor for the AAPG Bulletin and Geochimica Cosmochimica Acta, and is a past chairman of both the Organic Geochemistry Division of the Geochemical Society and AAPG’s Visiting Geologist Program.

He received AAPG’s Matson Award twice and served as an AAPG Distinguished Lecturer. Dr. Barker has written numerous technical papers and is the author of “Organic Geochemistry in Petroleum Exploration” (AAPG, 1980) and “Thermal Modeling: Theory and Applications” (Elsevier, 1996). He was one of the Principle Investigators for NASA’s Apollo 15 mission. He holds a B.A. in Chemistry and a D.Phil. in Geology from Oxford University, U.K., and was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin.