Dear InterPore colleagues,

Why is going to the office (or home office) so much fun (almost) every day? Porous media research has still so much to offer! High-end experimental equipment and super computer power frequently reveal new insights in seemingly well-known mechanisms, urging their revisit and fine tuning classical concepts. For example, just how much do we really fundamentally understand about multi-phase colloid transport through heterogeneous materials across many length scales…? That is why it is fun “almost” every day…because it can be overwhelming at times.

In this newsletter, you’ll find that two researchers from our InterPore community have been awarded for their great contributions to porous media research. Also, lectures on key topics and latest developments to be followed online. These and other efforts to move forward with our understanding of porous media. Knowledge that is then applied by, for example, the Los Alamos National Laboratory. See their Research Spotlight.

All the best,

Matthijs de Winter
Editor-in-Chief
InterPore News

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Notification about InterPore2021 abstracts

The last abstracts are currently being reviewed and a preliminary detailed program is being compiled. You will be notified about your abstract via email by Wednesday, 10 March.

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Poster presentation format

As with in-person conferences, the schedule constrains the allowable number of oral presentations. If you’re assigned to a poster presentation, it is safe to say you are assigned to a “poster presentation 2.0” or “poster (+) presentation”. The online nature of the poster presentations have a number of distinct and significant advantages over classic in-person poster presentations:

• The multimedia digital poster. This mandatory element of poster (+) presentations can include links and digital elements adding an interactive quality to posters.
• The optional pre-recorded presentation. Presenters who so choose, can provide a pre-recorded talk where you can present your research to attendees.
• The live poster Q&A session. Each poster (+) presenter will be assigned to one of the poster sessions during the conference. During the poster sessions each presenter will have a dedicated video conferencing room in which they can discuss their poster face-to-face.
• Supporting documents. In addition to the digital poster, each poster (+) presenter can upload an additional pdf for attendees to view. Plus, each poster (+) can support up to 50 additional photos to bring your research to life.
• Informal Q&A through chat. Each poster (+) will also have a dedicated chat area to discuss the poster at any time before, during and after the conference.

All of these elements will be found in one conveniently-located place in the online conference platform, making it easy for attendees to find and view everything. Plus, it will all be available beginning 22 May and through June 19, so there is ample opportunity for exploring and discussing posters.

More information on the conference format, including poster (+) presentations, can be found on the conference website.

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Conference Grant Applications

Thanks to generous donations from Procter & Gamble and several individual InterPore members, the InterPore Foundation would once again like to offer a number of conference grants to scientists from academic institutions from countries with lower- or middle-income economies, as defined by the World Bank, and to graduate students.

Information on eligibility and how to apply can be found on the conference website.

Applications must be received by Monday, 29 March.

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Sponsors & Exhibitors

During InterPore2021, participants are encouraged to connect with the conference sponsors & exhibitors found here. Benefits of making connections with the InterPore2021 sponsors & exhibitors includes:

• Recruitment opportunities
• Linking with experts in several porous media markets
• Sponsor & exhibitor showcase opportunities – Sponsors & Exhibitors will provide promotional materials to be showcased during one of the live portions of the conference.
• Dedicated exhibition time in the program – each day Exhibitors will be giving live demos, product explanations or live Q&A for participants.

For more information on InterPore2021 Sponsors & Exhibitors, please visit our website.

Online Short Course by Michel Quintard

The next InterPore Online Short Course deals with heat transfer in porous media and is taught by Michel Quintard.

Transfer in Porous Media: Various Models From a Multi-Scale Perspective

Instructor: Michel Quintard, Toulouse University, CNRS, France

Date: 27-30 April 2021

Time: 9:00-12:00 CET

Registration fee:

Member status	Students	Academic	Industry
InterPore members	100€	150€	200€
InterPore non-members	125€	190€	300€

Short courses have limited capacity. Click here to register.

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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.

Research Spotlight: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Although primarily known for its role in developing the first nuclear weapons, research at Los Alamos National Laboratory encompasses many scientific disciplines including the study of porous media. Very broadly, the twelve thousand employees of Los Alamos National Laboratory focus on nuclear deterrence, nuclear stockpile stewardship, protecting the United States against nuclear threats, understanding emerging threats and cybersecurity, and energy security solutions. The Earth and Environmental Sciences Division at LANL performs much of our research regarding porous materials and the flowing fluids passing through them. We combine our capabilities in field and laboratory measurements with analysis and modeling on high-performance computers to model and predict subsurface movement, reveal climate change drivers and ecosystem impacts, characterize geological greenhouse gas sequestration, improve geothermal and unconventional oil/gas extraction, predict wildland and urban fires, and provide advanced seismic imaging. Our division is broken up into three groups: Computational Earth Science, Earth Systems Observations, and Geophysics.

The full RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT can be found here.

General information from the LANL can be found here.

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We proudly present our Research Spotlights to highlight the work of selected members. This series is based on short scientific texts with illustrations that shed light on current projects or group contributions in various fields of porous media research. If you are an InterPore member and would like to contribute a Research Spotlight, please contact newsletter@interpore.org.

Kimberly-Clark Review and Invitation

From our colleagues at Stuttgart University, Germany, regarding Professor Sahimi’s recent virtual lecture:

This year’s Kimberly-Clark Distinguished Lectureship Award Holder, Professor Muhammad Sahimi from the University of Southern California, gave the second talk in the framework of SFB 1313‘s lecture series “Pretty Porous Science Lectures” on 23 February with the title “Atomistic modeling of nanoporous membranes”. Over 50 interested researchers from the University of Stuttgart and international collaborators of SFB 1313 attended the online lecture. We want to thank Prof. Sahimi for this very interesting talk and hope to welcome him in Stuttgart in person in the near future as well.

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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 Award Winners

InterPore Medal for Porous Media Research

With great pleasure, we can announce that this year’s InterPore Medal for Porous Media Research has been awarded to Marco Dentz for his excellent contributions to porous media research.

Professor Dr. Marco Dentz

Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research (IDAEA)
Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
Barcelona, Spain

Marco Dentz is a professor at the Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research (IDAEA) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Barcelona. His research focuses on hydrodynamic flow and transport in porous media and the quantitative understanding of flow, mixing and reactive transport phenomena from the pore to the regional scale. He combines theory, numerical simulation, and new data-analysis strategies to shed light on the fundamental mechanisms of flow, transport and deformation in heterogeneous porous and fracture media, and to derive theories and models for process prediction at large spatial and temporal scales. He received a Diploma degree in Physics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1997, where he also received a Dr. rer. nat. in 2000. After a postdoctoral stay at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, with a Minerva fellowship, he joined the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona as a Ramón y Cajal Fellow. Since 2009, he has been a full professor at IDAEA-CSIC.

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InterPore Award for Porous Media Research

We’re happy to announce that this year’s InterPore Award for Porous Media Research has been awarded to Hadi Hajibeygi for his excellent contributions to porous media research.

Dr. Hadi Hajibeygi

TU Delft
The Netherlands

Hadi is an associate professor at TU Delft, where he teaches and leads research on modeling, simulation and sensitivity analysis of subsurface processes for large-scale renewable energy storage, geo-energy exploitation, and greenhouse gas storage. He co-leads Delft Advanced Reservoir Simulation (DARSim) and leads TU Delft Subsurface Storage Theme. He has been co-chair of the InterPore scientific program committee for 3 years, and is in the committee of ECMOR & MIT Energy Symposium. He was the most Innovative Teaching Talent of TU Delft in 2018, holds a PhD with medal from ETH Zurich, and has experience with Chevron Energy Technology Company in California. He did his post-doctoral research at Stanford University until 2013 when he joined TU Delft. He is a Dutch National Science ViDi Laurette of 2019.

We are happy to invite you to our next Porous Media Tea Time Talks (#PorousMediaTTT) session at 9 March at 10:30 am CEST local time on our YouTube Channel.

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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)

Promote your Publication

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, Physics of wood drying, Université Gustave Eiffel, Paris, France

• PhD, Mathematically oriented geophysics on development of methodology for seismic monitoring of coupled processes in the subsurface, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bergen, Norway

• PhD, Computational mathematics on development, implementation and analysis of efficient and reliable solvers for flow in deformable porous media, Department of Mathematics, University of Bergen, Norway

• PhD, Applied and computational mathematics on mathematical models and solution approaches to rupture dynamics including advanced friction laws in the presence of fluids, Department of Mathematics, University of Bergen, Norway

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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.

Date	Event
2-5 May 2021	Third Biennial Meeting of Australian Chapter of InterPore, Perth, Australia
31 May - 3 June 2021	The 13th annual InterPore meeting (online)
15-21 May 2022	The 14th annual InterPore meeting (Qingdao, China)
22-25 May 2023	The 15th annual InterPore meeting (Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
2024	The 16th annual InterPore meeting (Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA)