Longhorn Loyalty
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August 20, 2015
In fall 2015, two award-winning assistant professors joined the department. After receiving their Ph.D. from UT PGE, they began their impressive careers in academia and industry. Heidari, a leader in the formation evaluation field, has published more than 60 papers and Okuno brings seven years of industry experience to UT PGE.
Both were recognized by SPE for their junior faculty research initiative at their respective institutions. We are proud to have members of the Longhorn family educating the next generation of talented petroleum engineers.
Zoya Heidari, Assistant Professor
Zoya Heidari served as an assistant professor and the Chevron Corporation faculty fellow in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas from September 2011 to August 2015. She founded and directed the Texas A&M Joint Industry Research Program on “Multi-Scale Formation Evaluation of Unconventional and Carbonate Reservoirs” from 2012 to 2015. She received a Ph.D. (2011) in petroleum engineering from The University of Texas at Austin.
Heidari is one of the recipients of the 2015 SPE Faculty Innovative Teaching Award as well as the 2014 TEES Select Young Faculty Fellows award from the College of Engineering at Texas A&M University. She was selected as one of the distinguished speakers of the Society of Petrophysicists and Well Log Analysts (SPWLA) in 2014. She is also one of the recipients of the 2012 SPE Petroleum Engineering Junior Faculty Research Initiation Award to develop her research program on formation evaluation of unconventional reservoirs.
Supervising 15 graduate students since 2011, she has published more than 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings. Her research interests include petrophysics, borehole geophysics, rock physics, inverse problems and reservoir characterization of unconventional reservoirs.
She currently serves on the technical committee for the SPWLA annual symposium, SPWLA education committee, the local organizing committee of the Society of Engineering Science (SES) conference and the steering committee for unconventional reserves task force summit.
Ryosuke Okuno, Assistant Professor
Ryosuke Okuno served as an assistant professor of petroleum engineering in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Alberta from 2010 to 2015. His research and teaching interests include enhanced oil recovery, thermal oil recovery, numerical reservoir simulation, thermodynamics, multiphase behavior and applied mathematics.
With seven years of industry experience as a reservoir engineer with Japan Petroleum Exploration Co., Ltd., Okuno brings a vast knowledge of the most pressing oil and gas challenges to UT PGE. Okuno is a registered professional engineer in Alberta, Canada.
He holds B.E. and M.E. degrees in geosystem engineering from the University of Tokyo and a Ph.D. in petroleum engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. He is a recipient of the 2012 SPE Petroleum Engineering Junior Faculty Research Initiation Award. In addition, he is currently an associate editor for the Journal of Natural Gas Science & Engineering.
