The late Fred Meissner was consistently “ahead of his time” across multiple specialties, and developed several key concepts that were later essential to the development of unconventional plays. He began his career at Shell Oil Company, working primarily as an explorationist in West Texas. He was instrumental in defining Permian Basin cyclic stratigraphy as a tool for shelf-to-basin correlation, and discovered three fields using the concepts of hydrodynamics. Fred then worked at the Shell Lab with M. King Hubbert, and later as an explorationist in Rocky Mountain basins. After leaving Shell, he worked extensively in the Williston Basin and published extremely influential papers on the Bakken source rock and its’ potential. In 1978, he was among the first to recognize and quantify source rock oil generation potential using resistivity and sonic logs. Nearly three decades later, the Bakken play was actively developed using some of those important concepts; consequently, Fred is considered by many to be the “Father of the Bakken.” For approximately 20 years, Fred was a dynamic adjunct professor at Colorado School of Mines teaching a graduate level petroleum geology course in which he instructed students to “think like a drop of oil.” For his many contributions to the field of petroleum exploration and education, the AAPG honored Fred with the Sydney Powers Memorial Award.