Petex Software Donation Puts Research on the MOVE
Petex donated its MOVE software suite in support of research and teaching led by Assistant Professor Chelsea Mackaman-Lofland.
A generous donation of cutting-edge software from PE Limited (Petex) will enhance the research of faculty and students in the UT Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences (EEPS).
The in-kind gift of the company’s MOVE software suite, valued at $2.7 million, licenses Assistant Professor Chelsea Mackaman-Lofland to use it in support of ongoing research and teaching in EEPS. This robust suite enables the department to be a hub across the southeast for research using the program.
“The MOVE software was donated to facilitate data integration and computational modeling in pursuit of science objectives in my starting research group,” said Mackaman-Lofland, who joined the department in 2024. “These objectives include understanding the shape (geometry), timing/magnitude of motion, and geodynamic forces driving activity along some of the major faults that shape Earth’s landscapes and generate natural disasters—earthquakes, but also landslides, tsunamis, etc.”
MOVE is geometric, kinematic, and dynamic modeling software that allows users to simulate, and even deconstruct, deformation along faults, folds, and other structures in the Earth to learn how they form. The MOVE suite provides a complete range of tools to build detailed and complex 3D models linking surface and subsurface geology; create, restore, and analyze geological cross-sections at local and regional scales; and quantify the geodynamic and Earth-surface (or topographic) response to faulting and fracturing.
Just over a dozen universities around the world have received similar donations from Petex, offering Mackaman-Lofland, her students, and the UT EEPS department a rare advantage for geological research.
“My students and I most frequently use MOVE to create sequentially forward, modeled cross-sections of the structures responsible for the construction of Earth’s major mountain ranges—including projects in the Argentine and Chilean Andes, Canada, the western US, and our Appalachian backyard,” said Mackaman-Lofland. “We explore the relationships among folding/faulting, the pathways rocks take to become exposed at Earth’s surface, and the evolution of topography.”
The MOVE software suite will also be used in Mackaman-Lofland’s graduate courses: EEPS 570 Advanced Structural Geology, EEPS 575 Tectonics, and the spring 2026 EEPS 670 Seminar in Structural Geology.
“I, and the department, greatly appreciate the opportunity Petex has provided us to work with and learn from the MOVE software suite,” said Mackaman-Lofland.
By Randall Brown