Foster and Ravikumar Win SPE Regional Awards
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June 28, 2023
Two faculty members in the Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering (UT PGE) won awards in May from the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) Southwestern North America Region. Associate Professor John Foster received the Data Science and Engineering Analytics Award, and Research Associate Professor Arvind Ravikumar received the Sustainability and Stewardship in the Oil and Gas Industry Award.
SPE regional awards honor members who contribute exceptional service and leadership and have made significant professional contributions within their technical disciplines. The Data Science and Engineering Analytics Award recognizes outstanding achievement or contributions to the advancement of petroleum engineering in the area of machine learning and data analytics, while the Sustainability and Stewardship Award recognizes outstanding efforts in the upstream oil and gas industry in promoting and adopting environmental, social and economic sustainability and best practices and technological innovation.
Dr. Foster holds the George H. Fancher Fellowship in Petroleum Engineering and is a core faculty member of UT Austin’s Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. He is co–principal investigator of DiReCT: Digital Reservoir Characterization Technology Industrial Affiliate Program and the core developer for Peridigm open source peridynamics software. His research interests are in experimental and computational mechanics and multi-scale modeling with applications to geomechanics, impact mechanics, fracture mechanics, and anomalous transport processes. Additionally, he has interest in fundamental theoretical advancement of the peridynamic theory of solid mechanics. He co-hosts the department’s annual Energy AI Hackathon and teaches all areas of theoretical and computational mechanics.
Dr. Ravikumar co-leads the Energy Emissions Modeling and Data Lab (EEMDL), which is working to address the growing need for accurate, timely and clear accounting of greenhouse gas emissions across global oil and natural gas supply chains. He serves on the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Gas Pipeline Advisory Committee, which evaluates proposed pipeline safety and environmental protection standards and makes policy recommendations, and a National Petroleum Council committee that is responding to the Secretary of Energy’s request for information on greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas systems. He also regularly testifies at congressional hearings on greenhouse gas impacts of energy supply chains and routinely engages with state and federal agencies on energy and climate policies.
