UT PGE Alumnus Honored with International SPE Technology Award
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November 03, 2021
Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering alumnus Faruk Omer Alpak (MSPE ’00, PhD ’05) received the 2021 Lester C. Uren Award from the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) in September. The prestigious international award recognizes distinguished achievement in petroleum engineering technology, and recipients automatically become SPE Distinguished Members.
Alpak is a principal science expert and a senior reservoir engineer on the Quantitative Reservoir Management team for Shell International Exploration and Production. His research focuses on reservoir simulator development and application, computational fluid dynamics, mathematical homogenization, digital rock physics, model-based optimization, in-situ conversion and upgrading processes, inverse problems, computational geomechanics, computational electromagnetics, and most recently, deep learning and its applications to carbon capture and sequestration. Before joining Shell in 2005, Alpak worked at the Schlumberger-Doll Research Center as a visiting scientist on mathematical modeling and inversion projects.
Alpak has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings, and one book chapter. He holds four patents/patent-applications. In addition to the 2021 Lester C. Uren Award, he received a 2021 Outstanding Technical Reviewer Award for the SPE Reservoir Evaluation & Engineering journal. He received SPE’s A Peer Apart Award in 2016; an SPE Journal Outstanding Associate Editor Award in 2008; and the Best Paper Award from the Society of Petrophysicists and Well Log Analysts’ Petrophysics journal in 2006 and 2003.
Alpak is an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences at Rice University. He is also an associate editor of SPE Journal and a member of SPE’s Reservoir Advisory Committee, and he serves on the organizing committees of the SPE ATCE and the SPE Reservoir Simulation Conference. He holds a BS in petroleum and natural gas engineering from the Middle East Technical University, Turkey, and an MS and PhD in petroleum engineering from The University of Texas at Austin.
