At the age of  26, McClure completed his Ph.D. and was hired to be on the faculty in  the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University  of Texas at Austin.

McClure and his colleagues performed a  research project on the interpretation of diagnostic fracture injection  tests. “I think this work was one of the most important that I’ve done  in my career. But after we published a paper about it, I realized that  most people in the industry did not understand or notice it. I decided  to go to the private sector so that I could work directly with the  industry and make things happen,” he says.