Dear InterPore friends,

In our daily rat race, we all seem to move from survival of the fittest to survival of the best
advertised. For InterPore this works in two ways. We offer a great network of scientists, institutes
and industry and we facilitate advertisement of scientific breakthrough and knowledge through our
InterPore chapters, InterPore2021, online webinars, the KC lecturers, the Newsletter, etc. But, of
course, we’re also relying on you, being part (or becoming part) of InterPore and promoting our
society further.

Sometimes a rat race, often great fun. For example, today’s InJournals promotion is simply a video
rather than text (see below). Of course, recognition of fantastic work by an InterPore award is also
part of it. The InterPore2021 update, webinars, podcasts, a competition… I think we have a lot to
offer!

All the best,

Matthijs de Winter
Editor-in-Chief
InterPore News

Updated Block program

The updated block program for InterPore2021 can be found on our website. It is clear
that InterPore2021 has a full program. Be aware that all the prerecorded talks will be available
days in advance. Make sure to book enough time prior to the conference as well!

Promotional video

Just in case you didn’t have the chance yet to watch the InterPore2021 promotional video, here it is once more, with thanks to
Hamed Aslannejad, Maja Rucker, Majid Hassanizadeh and Lilit Yeghiazarian!

InterPore
Academy Webinars

Please join us for the InterPore Academy Webinar online.

Professor Rainer Helmig will be presenting the lecture “From the brain to the fuel cell –
porous media are everywhere”. In order to attend this webinar, you need to register here. The link
to the webinar will be shared only with registered attendees.

The cost of registration and participation is FREE.

Date: Wednesday, 24 March 2021

Time (Notice that the time slot is suitable for Asia and Australia too!):

08:00 AM Central European Time

03:00 PM China Standard Time

03:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

12:00 AM (Midnight) Pacific Daylight Time

Speaker: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rainer Helmig

Lecture title: From the
brain to the fuel cell – porous media are everywhere

Dr. Behnam Pourdeyhimi will be presenting the lecture “Facemasks & Respirators –
Technology, Manufacturing & Performance”. In order to register to attend this
webinar, please visit here. The link
to the webinar will be shared only with registered attendees.

The cost of registration and participation is FREE.

Date: Wednesday, 7 April 2021

Time

10:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

04:00 PM Central European Summer Time

Speaker: Dr. Behnam Pourdeyhimi

Lecture title: Facemasks
& Respirators – Technology, Manufacturing & Performance

Please click here for more details
and information on the webinars.

The InterPore Academy for Porous Media is a new unit to promote educational activities, mainly to
serve younger researchers, with a range of short courses, webinars, and workshops. See the website for further information.

Kimberly-Clark Review and Invitation

From our colleague Steffen Berg from Shell, regarding Professor Sahimi’s recent virtual lecture:

Visit of the Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lecturer at
Shell

Prof. Sahimi gave a very well-received lecture on swelling in porous media, part of the KC
distinguished lectureship award.

An audience of 25-30 participants with background from chemical catalysis to CO2 sequestration
and hydrocarbon recovery attended the virtual lecture from 3 different locations, Houston,
Amsterdam and Bangalore. After the lecture the attendees asked detailed questions ranging from
the structure-dependent swelling behavior of clay to details of the molecular dynamics
simulation such as long-range corrections to the potentials used. In summary, the lecture was a
great success.

Steffen Berg (Shell)

Interested in inviting Prof. Sahimi to your institute? Prof. Sahimi offers lectures on various
topics:

• Use of wavelet transformations for characterization, modeling, and upscaling of porous media

• Multipoint geostatistical modeling of porous media

• Swelling and deformation of porous media

• Atomistic modeling of nanoporous membranes.

If possible, Prof. Sahimi will come to your institute in person. Alternatively, he will present
online. Interested? Please request his lecture by filling out the application
form and returning it to the InterPore
office.

Please note that the availability of Prof. Sahimi is limited and not all requests can be honored by
the lecturer.

InterPore Membership benefits update

If you are a researcher in any field related to porous media research, it is worth
considering becoming a member of InterPore and enjoying a long list of benefits.

Today, we’d like to point out two benefits:

• NEW International Society for Porous Media (InterPore) is affiliated to
  Energies and Batteries journals. A 10% discount on article processing charges
  to all InterPore members who publish in Energies and Batteries; more
  information here
  (PDF 202 KB).
• Post a Job
  Opening via InterPore website – When posting a job offer, please start with
  a short overview giving the following information: Employer and Position, job location, starting
  date, contact details.

InterPore Award Winners

InterPore Honorary Lifetime Membership Award

With great pleasure, we can announce that this year’s InterPore Honorary Lifetime
Membership Award has been awarded to Brian Berkowitz for his extraordinary contributions to
porous media science and technology, being world renown in the porous media community, while his
contributions are consistent with the aims and ideals of InterPore.

Professor Dr. Brian
Berkowitz

Weizmann Institute of Science

Israel

Brian Berkowitz obtained his BSc and MSc degrees in Applied Mathematics from the University of
Alberta, Canada, and his DSc at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. From 1986 to 1991, he
served as a research hydrologist in Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture and subsequently as a visiting
professor at the University of British Columbia (Canada), before joining the Weizmann Institute of
Science (Israel) in 1993 where he has served as a full professor since 2005. His research centers
around the experimental analysis and quantitative modelling of fluid and reactive chemical transport
in geological formations, with particular emphasis on soil and groundwater systems. His group has
also developed several methods and patents for treatment of contaminated water and industrial
effluents, heavy oil upgrading, and CO2 sequestration. He has co-authored well over 200 journal
publications and two reference textbooks (published by Springer), he serves actively as an editor
for journals in the field, and he has received key international awards. Brian is also an
accomplished musician, having played bassoon professionally in the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and
in numerous chamber ensembles in Canada and Israel.

InterPore Meritorious Service Medal

InterPore Executive Committee has selected Professor Oleg Iliev as the first recipient of InterPore
Meritorious Service Medal. The InterPore Meritorious Service Medal recognizes individuals for
exceptional, prolonged, impactful, and meaningful services to the Society.

Professor
Oleg Iliev

Fraunhofer-Institut für Techno- und
Wirtschaftsmathematik ITWM

Germany

Professor Iliev has been involved in the establishment and development of InterPore from day one. He
was present at the founding meeting of InterPore held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, on 09 April 2008
and was subsequently elected by the members as the first InterPore president. He was a member of the
Executive Committee for six years and contributed to many initiatives in InterPore’s development.

Prof. Iliev volunteered to organize the first InterPore annual meeting in March 2009 at ITWM
Fraunhofer Institute, Kaiserslautern, Germany. This was a milestone event for InterPore. Since then,
he has been involved in the organization of every InterPore meeting since 2012. He acted as the
chair of the Program Committee of four annual meetings: InterPore2013, InterPore2014, InterPore2015,
and InterPore2016; since 2015 he has been the chair of the Events Committee, which is in charge of
finding new sites for InterPore meetings and all of the logistics for those meetings; and when the
InterPore meeting went online, he took over the role of Organizing Committee chair and led the
efforts for the successful organization of InterPore2020 and now chairs the Organizing Committee of
InterPore2021.

As Prof. Iliev has been active in the organization of short courses through his role as Event
Committee chair, he has agreed to serve as the interim director of the recently formed InterPore
Academy of Porous Media. Prof. Iliev has also been instrumental in arranging for a number of
organizations to become institutional members of InterPore. It is clear that the time and efforts
that Prof. Iliev has invested in InterPore and his dedication have been unparalleled. For his
continual service and commitment to the advancement of the InterPore Society, Prof. Iliev is a most
worthy inaugural recipient of the InterPore Meritorious Service Medal.

Curious about InterPore Awards? Please find more information here. You can always send in a nomination for a
colleague.

We are happy to invite you to our next Porous Media Tea Time Talks (#PorousMediaTTT) session
at 23 March at 15:00 am CEST local
time on our YouTube
Channel.

The goal of the Porous Media TTT is to act as a complimentary platform to the already very successful
Geoscience and Geoenergy
webinars with the focus placed on young professionals.

We are very much looking forward to seeing you online!

Catherine Spurin (ICL), Kamalijt Singh (HW), Marcel Moura (PoreLab, UiO), Tom Bultreys (UGhent),
Mohammad Nooraiepour (UiO), Maja Rücker (ICL)

New podcast: This Academic Life

I am Pania Newell, a member of InterPore. My research is focused on understanding coupled processes
in heterogeneous porous media across scales.

I am excited to announce that along with two of my colleagues Lucy Zhang, and Kim Lewis, we started a
podcast called “This Academic Life”, which is an
academic podcast for educators and researchers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM).
Our goal is to encourage, inspire, and support educators and researchers while we all explore and
thrive in This Academic Life.

The InterPore Community consists of educators and students from across the world with a
common passion for and fascination with porous media. I personally believe we are all surrounded by
natural or man-made porous media, and I think many of you agree with me. Although, our podcast does
not talk about porous media directly, it addresses many important aspects of this academic life that
we are all living and experiencing. For instance, disseminating our scientific knowledge and
discoveries to the broader audience, collaborating with researchers from other institutions, how to
be a successful researcher, how to make our community more inclusive, and many other topics. This
podcast is designed to address challenges and opportunities that we are all facing in our academic
career.

Listen/subscribe to the show on: Apple Podcasts,
Spotify,
Google
Podcasts, Amazon
Music, and YouTube.

ARMA Student Design Competition

On behalf of the 13 ARMA Student Chapters, I am happy to announce the first ARMA Student Design
Competition.

The competition, jointly organized by ARMA student chapters at the University of Kentucky and
Virginia Tech, offers undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity to test their knowledge,
creativity, team-work, and problem-solving skills by exposing them to a real-life rock
engineering-related case-study problem. The competition is sponsored by ITASCA Consulting Group and
the College of Engineering at the University of Kentucky. ARMA will provide a jury of leading
experts in rock mechanics/geomechanics. Winners will be announced at the 55th US Rock Mechanics /
Geomechanics Symposium in June 2021.

Details can be found at the website.

–Peter Smeallie, Executive Director, ARMA

Predicting the Water
Balance from Optimization of Plant Productivity

A.G. Hunt, B. Faybishenko, B. Ghanbarian

(From the editors) Exchanging scientific achievements on a global scale is traditionally done
through peer-reviewed scientific journals. That is a strong and reliable method. Attracting
attention to your scientific achievement is increasingly challenging. In that respect, Hunt,
Faybishenko and Ghanbarian did a great job in making a YouTube video about this paper. For the
full paper, please follow the link below. And the video can be found here:

GSA
TODAY, Article, pp. 28–29
Corresponding Authors: Allen Hunt

InterPore Members, do you want to promote your publication to the community? If so, please submit
your highlight to newsletter@InterPore.org.
Clearly indicate which of the authors is an InterPore member (or the institute with an
Institutional Membership). Note that we will not review the entries nor does
InterPore endorse the published work. Furthermore, we publish on a “submitted first, published
first” basis. The highlighted publication should be no older than 6 months (available
online).

The highlight should be short (max 100 words) and contain an illustration.
Please note that we offer this opportunity exclusively to InterPore members. If you would like
to become a member, please have a look here.

• PhD
  Position, Hydro-chemo-mechanical behavior of cementitious materials from the aggregate to
  the continuum scale, CSIC Barcelona, Spain

If you have a job opening in your institute and would like to promote it internationally, please
send the description and weblink or PDF to newsletter@interpore.org, and we’ll be happy to
add it to the list.