The Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M University welcomes three new faculty members for the spring semester of 2015.
Sara Abedi, assistant professor, joined the department in January. She obtained her Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Southern California in 2012. Abedi’s most recent position was as a postdoctoral research associate for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Her research interests include experimental and theoretical microporomechanics, nano-chemomechanical characterization of porous materials, and granular material failure and flow. Abedi has developed a novel methodology in nano-chemomechanical characterization of gas shales, studied microstructure of gas shales and the role of kerogen maturity and chemical composition on the mechanical performance of organic rich shales, and characterized and quantified experimentally the micro- and meso-scale kinematics associated with shear banding in sand and the impact of material heterogeneity on shear band development in sand.
Ibere Alves is joining the department this January as a professor of engineering practice. He was formerly a senior technical advisor for Artificial Lift and Flow Assurance at Petrobras for 33 years. He holds a Ph.D. in petroleum engineering from the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.
Alves has several years of both theoretical and experimental research and development experience in the field of production engineering, particularly deep-water production, artificial lift and field development; including his involvement in a multidisciplinary project with Shell and a computer modelling group to develop a next generation simulator for production facilities performed in Canada. He is also the author or co-author of several technical journal papers, conference papers, and many technical reports in the area of Petroleum Production.
Kan Wu began her position as assistant professor for the department in January as well. She received her Ph.D. in petroleum engineering in 2014 from the University of Texas at Austin.
Her research interests include modeling of complex hydraulic fracture development in unconventional reservoirs, interaction analysis of hydraulic fractures with natural fractures, coupled geomechanics/fluid flow modeling, analysis of wellbore strengthening, and evaluation of well performance from unconventional gas and oil reservoirs. She has conducted internship research for both Schlumberger and Chevron and has assisted in teaching courses on reservoir geomechanics and petrophysics.