Dr. Jihoon Kim has joined the faculty of the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering as an assistant professor. Kim, previously a geological research scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, began work at Texas A&M in August.
Department Head Dan Hill said, “We are very pleased to have Dr. Jihoon Kim joining our faculty this fall. His geomechanics expertise is a great fit for the department to push forward our growing research in the areas of hydraulic fracturing, shale reservoir development, and wellbore mechanics.”
Originally from South Korea, Kim received his Ph.D. in petroleum engineering from Stanford University prior to becoming a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California. His bachelor's and master's degrees are in civil, urban, and geosystem engineering from Seoul National University. His areas of research interest include:
- Coupled flow and geomechanics in hydrate, shale and tight gas, and geothermal reservoirs (i.e., chemo-thermo-poro-mechanics);
- Hydraulic fracturing, hydro-shearing, and coupled geomechanic-geophysical modeling;
- Reservoir simulation and computational geomechanics; and
- Nuclear waste disposal and geological CO2 sequestration
In 2012, Kim was the recipient of the Director’s Award for Exceptional Achievement at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. He is also an awarded reviewer, and has reviewed papers for such journals as Water Resources Research; Transport in Porous Media; Computers & Geosciences; Computers & Geotechics; Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering; International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics; SPE Journal; Marine and Petroleum Geology; Computational Geosciences; International Journal of Oil, Gas, and Coal Technology; ASME Journal of Energy Resources Technology. He has published or presented numerous papers in journals and conferences.
In addition to reviewing, writing, and research, Kim is also adept at software development, especially in regards to geomechanics simulator coding and its coupling to reservoir simulators.