The InterPore Election 2020 has now closed. Results will be communicated shortly. Thank you to all members who participated and voted in this years election.
The InterPore Elections will be held from 1 – 30 November 2020.
All current InterPore members are eligible to vote. If you are a member, expect an email from MyDirectVote.net on November 1 which includes a personalized link to our voting platform. There you will be able to elect a new President-Elect, five new Council members and three members of the Student Affairs Committee (SAC).
The Election Committee, chaired by Gabriel Wittum, will ensure that the elections will be conducted in a transparent and fair manner.
The candidates standing for election are listed below.
President-elect
Karsten Thompson
Louisiana State University (USA)
Karsten Thompson has a BS degree from the University of Colorado and MSE and PhD degrees from the University of Michigan, all in chemical engineering. He joined the LSU Department of Chemical Engineering in 1996 as an assistant professor, later promoted to associate and full professor. In 2011 he was appointed department chair of the Craft & Hawkins Department of Petroleum Engineering at LSU (term ending in 2022). He holds the Longwell-Leonard Distinguished Professorship and the Malcolm C., Jr. and Gene Perdue Lowe Professorship. His research interests are in flow and reaction in porous materials, with particular focus on multiphase flow, particle transport and retention, pore-scale modeling, and multiscale modeling. His research has been applied across disciplines and funded extensively by industry, including the oil & gas industry as well as materials science, consumer products, and membrane separations companies.
Lilit Yeghiazarian
University of Cincinnati (USA)
Dr. Yeghiazarian is an Associate Professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at the University of Cincinnati. She holds degrees in electrical and industrial engineering from the Polytechnic Institute and the American University of Armenia. Dr. Yeghiazarian obtained her Ph.D. from Cornell’s Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering for her work on microbial dynamics in complex environmental systems. She studied active polymer materials at Cornell’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering as a postdoctoral fellow.
Dr. Yeghiazarian is a recipient of numerous awards, including the Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) from NSF, the Ruth Kirschstein award from NIH, the InterPore Rosette Award from the International Society for Porous Media, and most recently the Convergence Accelerator Award on Urban Flooding from NSF. Her research portfolio covers topics ranging from watershed processes, sustainability and environmental sensing to porous media and multifunctional materials.
Council
Benoit Noetinger
IFP Energies nouvelles, France
Benoît Noetinger graduated from the École Polytechnique in Paris, and holds a thesis at UPMC (now Sorbonne University) in liquid state physics, the work of which was carried out at the PMMH laboratory of ESPCI. He supported an HDR at UPMC in 2000. He joined IFPEN in 1989, to work on the development of up-scaling techniques allowing to carry out large-scale simulations of flows in porous media by using detailed information as well as possible, that are more and more numerous because of the improvement of acquisition techniques.
Benoît has taken responsibility for various research projects involving industrial partners (PETROBRAS, TOTAL, Gaz de France), while co-supervising thesis projects allowing him to stay in close contact with academic teams. He also developed original techniques from statistical physics to model flows in fractured media.
Benoît was advisor of 8 PhD students and teaches in engineering schools such as Centralesupelec, les Mines de Paris, IFP School, UPPA. He taught at University of Wyoming. He is invited visiting scientist at USTC Hefei, China. He is member of scientific committees of conferences such as INTERPORE international conference on Porous media.
He authored 7 patents and 56 peer-reviwed articles. he evaluated grant applications ANR, he carried out laboratory evaluations HCERES. He is member of the editorial committee of CR Géosciences, published by French Académie des Sciences He was awarded Prix Adrien Constantin de Magny 2019 by the Académie des Sciences (French Academy of Sciences).
Márcio Murad
National Laboratory for Scientific Computation (LNCC), Brazil
Márcio Murad is one of the South American leaders in the field of Computational Modelling of Coupled Phenomena in Porous Media. Within this context, he has developed several innovative multiscale models with particular applications in Reservoir Geomechanics, Carbonate Rocks with Geological Complexity, and Nanoporous Materials. He has a strong theoretical, numerical, and applied background and has encouraged the scientific community in Brazil to solve natural challenge multi-disciplinary problems involving real complex data. He has had active participation in the Brazilian chapter of Interpore and particularly co-chaired the third event hosted byhis home institution LNCC. He has published 70 papers in refereed journals with 1268 Citations in the Scopus database achieving H-Factor= 20
Maja Rücker
Imperial College London, UK
In my research, I investigate the properties of the internal surfaces of porous media and their relation to macroscopic flow responses. Since the beginning of my research activities, I follow and participate in the activities and conferences of the Interpore society with passion. I served the community as a founding member of the Interpore Student Affairs Committee and a member of the Interpore National Chapters Committee. Recently, I founded in collaboration with other young researchers within the Interpore community the Porous Media Tea Time Talks, a Youtube platform for young researchers working in the area of porous media to communicate their newest research findings.
Within this scope, I very much enjoyed fostering activities within the Interpore community, in particular for early career researchers. I would be very excited to serve the Interpore society as a member of the council to utilize my experience to shape the future of Interpore.
I received my PhD in Petroleum Engineering in a joint project of the Rock & Fluid Physics team at Shell Global Solutions International B.V. and Imperial College London and hold a BSc and MSc degree in Geoscience from the Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz. Currently, I am a Research Associate in the Chemical Engineering Department at Imperial College London. Soon, I am going to start as an Assistant Professor on experimental diagnostics of porous media at the Mechanical Engineering Department at the Eindhoven University of Technology.
Maša Prodanović
University of Texas at Austin, USA
Maša Prodanović has been an associate professor at the Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering (PGE), The University of Texas (UT) at Austin since September 2016, and on UT PGE faculty since 2010. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics from
the University of Zagreb, Croatia and a PhD in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Stony Brook University, New York, USA. Her research interests include multiphase flow and image‐based porous media characterization especially applied to heterogeneous porous media, pore network models, shale gas flow, particulate flow and formation damage, as well as sediment mechanics, fracturing and ferrohydrodynamics. She received SPE Formation Evaluation regional award for development of Digital Rocks Portal in 2019, Texas 10 (top faculty) and Stony Brook 40 Under Forty awards in 2017, SPE Faculty Innovative Teaching Award in 2014 and Interpore Procter & Gamble Research Award for Porous Media Research in 2014. She organized and instructed internationally multiple short courses on digital rock physics and has been active in InterPore in various committees since the very beginning.
Seetha N.
Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India
Dr. Seetha N. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India. She obtained her Masters from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India and PhD from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. Her research interests include understanding fluid flow and colloid transport in porous media through multi-scale experiments and multi-scale modeling, upscaling of transport processes, co-transport of multiple colloids, and environmental implications of engineered nanoparticles. She is a recipient of INSPIRE Faculty Award from Department of Science and Technology, Government of India in 2016. She is currently working on three projects funded by Department of Science and Technology, Government of India and is supervising four PhD students.
Thomas Ramstad
Equinor ASA, Norway
Dr Thomas Ramstad is a principal researcher and project manager in reservoir technology at Equinor ASA. He has broad experience from various parts of sub surface technology and flow in porous media on different scales. A main part of the research is to develop and apply digital workflows to investigate flow mechanisms in porous rocks by combining flooding experiments, advanced X-ray tomography imaging, digital rock physics. Such results are crucial input for upscaling of multiphase flow in sub-surface reservoirs. Dr Ramstad has large experience in the use of different types of software and digital analysis tools,
many of which require high-performance computing. He has supervised several external research projects and has a strong interest in joining efforts from academia and industry. He is currently the Equinor contact person towards InterPore and sits in the InterPore Industry Committee. Dr Ramstad holds a PhD in physics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and joined Equinor (former Statoil) in 2013.
Vahid Niasar
University of Manchester, UK
Dr Vahid Niasar is a Reader at the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Manchester. After joining the University of Manchester in 2014 and he initiated the establishment of InterPore UK chapter – which he chairs since 2015- in collaboration with other UK universities and industries.
He was elected as the chair of InterPore Council in 2019. At the University of Manchester, Vahid established the Integrated Multiscale Porous Media Research (IMPRES) group and also the new MSc programme of Subsurface Energy Engineering (starting 2021). Prior to joining the University of Manchester, he worked as a research reservoir engineering at Shell, Netherlands. His main research interests are the utilisation of modelling and experimental methods to understand, simulate and predict porous materials processes for diverse engineering and natural applications such as subsurface
energy, renewable energy (fuel cells and batteries), hydrogeology. Vahid has more than 60 ISI peer-reviewed publications (h-index=23 with 2123 citations).
Veerle Cnudde
University of Ghent, Belgium
Prof. Veerle Cnudde received a PhD in Geology in 2005 from Ghent University (Belgium) where she has been a research professor since 2010. She is team leader of PProGRess (www.pprogress.ugent.be), the Pore-scale Processes in Geomaterials Research group (Dept. of Geology, UGent) and is one of the coordinators of the Ghent University Expertise Centre for X-Ray Tomography (UGCT). She was one of the co-founders of the UGCT spin-off company Inside Matters, which later merged with the spin-off company XRE, now part of TESCAN.
She specializes in non-destructive imaging of geomaterials and has a strong expertise in real-time imaging of processes in the pore space. Research projects which she has initiated are strongly linked to weathering and fluid flow processes of porous sedimentary rocks, as well as conservation of building stones.
Prof. Veerle Cnudde has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles. She is currently the Chair of the Proposal Review Committee (PRC) of the TOMCAT beamline at Swiss Light Source (SLS). She is one of the co-founders of InterPore BENELUX and an elected Council Member of InterPore. In 2019, she became a part-time Full Professor at the Environmental Hydrogeology group at Utrecht University in the field of “Porous media imaging techniques”.
Yongfei Yang
China University of Petroleum (East China), China
Yongfei Yang is an associate professor, director of International Affairs & Talents Office in School of Petroleum Engineering at China University of Petroleum (East China). He is an active InterPore member (Acting as secretary-general of InterPore China Chapter) and a life member of International Society of Core Analysts (SCA). He is the associate editor of Journal of Natural Gas Science and Engineering (JNGSE) and editorial board member of the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering (JPSE). He is also the co-chair of InterPore 2022 Qingdao Local Committee.
His research interests include theory and applications of fluid flow in porous media, the applications of digital rock and pore network model technology in oil and gas field development etc. He is the principal investigator of 4 research projects supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, two of them is NSFC-UK international joint projects), 2 projects supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, 1 project supported by the Ministry of Education, and 10+ projects supported by oil companies in China. He has published more than 100 journal papers in the Chemical Engineering Journal, Water Resources Research, Fuel, and Journal of Geophysical Research-Solid Earth, and others.
Yang holds a BASc, an MASc, and a PhD, all in petroleum engineering, from the China University of Petroleum (East China). During Sep. 2008 and Aug. 2009, he studied in Heriot-Watt University, Scotland UK as a visiting PhD student.
Student Affairs Committee
Abhay Guleria is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Civil Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, India. He has obtained a Master of Science (by Research) in Civil Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi. He worked on the solute transport modeling through stratified porous media with time-dependent dispersion. He has published research papers in Scopus, Science Citation indexed journals and presented research work at conferences of National and International repute. His research interests include solute transport through saturated porous media, mesoscopic modeling approach, and human health risk assessment of contaminated site (landfill, open dumping site, NAPLs spill over the ground surface). Abhay is currently working on his Ph.D. dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Sumedha Chakma in the area of solute transport modeling, considering the influence of low permeability regions, diffusion and sorption processes, and implementing temporal moment analysis.
Abhishek is currently pursuing PhD from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. His specialization includes the regional scale decadal assessment of water resources in India. Before starting the PhD, Abhishek has completed his M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, securing the department gold medal. He has also been awarded DAAD scholarship for his master’s project at TU Dresden, Germany. He has completed his B.Tech from IIT Roorkee in civil engineering. During B.Tech, he has completed his research internship at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He is a regular student member of professional societies including AGU and JpGU, among others, and has presented his research work in more than 10 national and international conferences. Apart from the field projects on groundwater resources management using hydrogeological methods, he has hands-on experience in physical and numerical modelling of various processes (e.g., moisture redistribution) in porous media using genetic algorithms and computation software like Hydrus and comsol. His long term goal is to contribute in the effective and efficient water availability in developing countries like India.
We, as a society, are paying much less attention to our environment compared to the extent of harm we are doing to it. My passion is to contribute to the healing of our environment which has been put to severe pollution stress over the last century. I am currently pursing PhD in the area of environmental sciences, where I am researching for efficient options to monitor and assess the polluted soil-water resources. I am enrolled in the department of hydrology at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India.
I believe in knowledge sharing and community participation for problem solving. Driven by these thoughts, I have always been an active participant and member of numerous trainings, workshops, and societies, etc. aiming for capacity building.
My educational background includes an MSc in Environmental Studies and Resource Management from TERI School of Advanced Studies, New Delhi, India. Before that, I graduated from the University of Delhi, India with a BSc in Chemistry.
I consider myself a nature lover which also reflects in my hobbies being mountain trekking and gardening. I am committed to diligently work towards the conservation of environment and achieve a sustainable life on the Earth.
Javier is currently a PhD candidate supervised by Maša Prodanović at the University of Texas at Austin. He has been teaching the machine (with reasonable success) about physics at the pore-scale. His primary interests include heterogenous materials, multiphase flow, deep neural networks and climbing rocks. His favorite professional society is InterPore and he is very excited about being able to help them more formally to achieve their mission.
I hold a MSc in Mathematics from the National University of Colombia. I am a PhD student in Mathematics at Hasselt University, Belgium.
My main field of research is numerical analysis. I also worked on areas like artificial intelligence, stochastic process, and flow problems.
In all cases, the focus was on mathematical and computational approaches. Currently, I work on the simulation of the dynamic behavior of fluids immersed in highly anisotropic and heterogeneous porous media. My goal is to develop mathematical models and numerical schemes to solve multi-scale problems defined in complex domains with evolving interfaces at the micro scale.
Nara Santos is a scientific researcher as a Ph.D. student at the Federal University of Uberlândia in Uberlândia, Brazil. Her research focuses on non-Newtonian fluid flow through porous media. As enthusiastic about learning and science interface between laboratory and industry, she intends to be in line with science development. Her deep progress with porous media was made possible through a scientific exchange program. Nara was a visiting scholar at the University of Kansas, United States of America. She applied X-ray micro-computed tomography and digital image analysis in geoscience. She was specifically interested in the filter cake formation in drilling operations. Her master’s thesis was also related to petroleum exploration. She investigated the stability of muds regarding the monitoring of solid volumetric concentration. Her current laboratory has a partnership with Petrobras, a Brazilian oil company. She is engaged in research activities to overcome challenges in the oil field. She is passionate about energy resources. Her contact with laboratory routine started during her undergraduate course. Nara is a Chemical Engineer who graduated from the Federal University of Viçosa, Brazil. There she was a team member of the cellulose and pulp group. She had a summer trainee opportunity at Metsä Board Research Center in Finland from this latter experience. Besides hard skills, Nara intends to dialogue. She wants to learn from people and share her professional and personal experiences. She believes in a community environment to build committed professional societies and encourage young professionals and students to be part of them. For that, she is in touch with advanced professionals by attending conferences and online talks and courses. She also instructs young students in technical research activities and academic formation. She understands that her background can motivate initial researchers to face new challenges and become inspiring people. Cultural differences and different points of view are enriching factors for human formation. She hopes to spread knowledge and make it accessible.
Tao Zhang is currently a PhD candidate at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, majoring in Earth Science and Engineering. He earned a master’s and a Bachelor of Engineering in storage and transportation of oil and gas, both from China University of Petroleum in Beijing. As an active early-career researcher, Tao’s research interests are focusing on the computational fluid dynamics and thermodynamics in reservoirs, as well as geological data analysis. Recently, he has started the investigation of applying deep learning and artificial intelligence techniques in petroleum-related areas.
Tao has participated in 16 publications on peer-reviewed, high level journals and lead 8 of them as the first author. Besides, he has attended several international conferences including the InterPore annual meeting, and 4 conferences papers have been recorded in the proceedings. Very recently, Tao and his advisor, Prof. Shuyu Sun, have published a book with Elsevier, named <Reservoir Simulation: Machine Learning and Modeling >.
Besides his recognized academic work, Tao has also actively participated in the activities in InterPore. He helped his advisor in the establishment of InterPore Saudi National Chapter, and was elected as the General Secretary in the Chapter Steering Committee.