This document details a proposal for an industrially sponsored consortium for research in seismic inversion at Rice University. This consortium project will be directed by Professor William W. Symes in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics (formerly called The Department of Mathematical Sciences), George Brown School of Engineering. This project will develop novel approaches pioneered by Professor Symes to velocity and reflectivity estimation from waveform data, and will offer its sponsors both pilot software for state-of-the-art vector and parallel computing platforms, and a database of experience in waveform inversion. Participants will include graduate student assistants, postdoctoral research associates, and (whenever possible) short-and long-term visitors from the sponsoring organizations.