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Computational science is a field obsessed with convergence, where equations are scripted to result in real-world numbers that minimize risk and chance as much as possible.

With that in mind, it’s a bit ironic that Mary Wheeler, the director of the ICES Center for Subsurface Modeling, became a mathematician and computational scientist because of an accidental encounter.

“My roommate in college was taking a numerical analysis course and I would see her working on those problems and I thought ‘that’s interesting.’ And that’s how I first got involved,” said Wheeler, who was enrolled in the late 1950s at The University of Texas as a government major. “It happened by circumstance.”

That exposure ignited chain of events, starting with Wheeler adding a math major to her undergraduate studies, which would lead her to pursue a career in mathematics. Although her start in the field may have been a chance affair, Wheeler is now purposefully driving her chosen field forward as a world-renown researcher in subsurface modeling.

She has published over 250 research papers, and has made advancements in developing algorithms for modeling subsurface flow in a variety of contexts, from reservoirs of oil and gas beneath the earth’s surface to blood flow beneath the human integument.

Now, her achievements have been recognized with the John von Neumann Medal, the highest award bestowed by the Unites States Association for Computational Mechanics. The award honors individuals who have made “outstanding, sustained contributions in the field of computational mechanics generally over periods representing substantial portions of their professional careers.”

John von Neumann, the award’s namesake, was a 20th century scientist and mathematician whose fundamental contributions to computer science, applied mathematics, and physics—as well as his ability to astound his colleagues with his feats of mental math—put him in the pantheon of scientific greats.

“It’s a very prestigious award. And I’d like to say, I’m excited because von Neumann has been one of my heroes in science,” said Wheeler. “He appreciated the importance of these problems.”

Digging Deeper

It’s not rare to hear mathematicians use the word “elegance” to describe the intrinsic beauty of a well-constructed theorem, even if it’s not being applied to any “real-world” problem. Some mathematicians prefer to work with pure mathematics and focus on elegance over application.

Wheeler is not one of them.

“One of the things I noticed as a graduate student was that there were a lot of people in math who weren’t really interested in physical problems. And that always bothered me,” said Wheeler. “Because I think it is interesting to do a problem just for curiosity. But it is exciting to see how you can apply it.”

The homepage to her personal website echoes this sentiment with a bolded, mission-statement at the top of the page.

"I really enjoy developing efficient and accurate solutions to real-world problems,
 while maintaining a solid theoretical base."

But the best way to see Wheeler’s approach to mathematics and computational science is to examine her range of research projects and published papers spanning more than 50 years. Her research is united by the common topic of subsurface modeling, where the biggest funders come from the oil and gas industry, but the applications range much further than what an oil drill bit can reach.

“Your body is a subsurface and bones and breasts are a porous media. And the same mathematical models we do for geological subsurface also apply to the subsurface of the body,” said Wheeler. “This is not just a one-shot deal. Mathematics is the language of sciences and how you communicate results. And with this language, you can communicate it across different disciplines.”

In the past, Wheeler has applied a mathematical lens towards understanding topics like ground subsidence, where subsurface changes cause the Earth’s surface to cave-in or shift, blood vessel formation, and contaminant transport in ground water.

ICES researchers are helping develop safe, secure, and economical underground storage of CO2 by integrating multiple scientific disciplines to understand the various processes occurring from molecular to field scales. The unique aspect of ICES research is the approach of the uncertainty and of the complexity of the fluids in the geological media from the molecular scale to field scale, and their integration in computational tools to better predict the long-term behavior of subsurface energy byproduct storage.

Her most recent research aligns closely with issues on the forefront of the energy industry—how to safely extract oil and gas from the ground and how to store the greenhouse gas by-products that are released when those substances are combusted.

A model that Wheeler is developing shows how fractures induced in rock during the hydraulic fracturing process propagate and how fluids like water, chemicals and natural gas flow through the fractures.

“One of the issues is how do you connect [hydraulic fracturing] models with a fluid simulator. And that’s not really being done right now [by other researchers],” said Wheeler.

Having a better idea how fractures spread in a rock, and liquids through them, is important to informing fracturing methods that don’t disturb groundwater—an especially valuable resource in Texas, where some cities’, including San Antonio’s, water supply is almost completely dependent on ground water wells.

Another model of Wheeler’s is simulating how rock can be used as a holding tank. The thinking here is to store CO2 gas in saline aquifers under the earth’s surface, keeping the gas out of the atmosphere where it could contribute to the greenhouse effect, and out of the ocean where the gas contributes to ocean acidification.

“The idea is that if we stop the gas now, we can eliminate some of these greenhouse gasses to buy time until people can use solar, or come up with other approaches of energy,” said Wheeler. “We’ve seen that geomechanics needs to be incorporated into these carbon sequestration problems.”

“It’s these issues of trying to tie environmental concerns with production,” said Wheeler. “You want it to be environmentally prudent.”

Wheeler and her research team have developed algorithms to combine geomechanics physics with fluid models. Each step of the combined model has hundreds of millions of unknown values, said Wheeler. But by developing a mathematical technique called figurative coupling, Wheeler and her team have been able to achieve convergence, or values that can be applied to real world problems.

“The technique is really nice for these problems because they are computationally intensive and this approach seems to converge quite fast and it’s very robust,” said Wheeler.

Developing “new mathematics”—algorithms and analytic techniques that have never been used before—is what Wheeler and her research team must do to approximate sub-surface simulations that mirror reality, that understand the interaction of various processes to create an over-arching effect.

It’s an immense change from what Wheeler studied as a post-doctoral mathematics student at Rice University in the 1970s. Then, physics problems could only be approached in one dimension, with 10 data elements, and computer code was written on paper punch cards. Now, Wheeler says, problems take into account three dimensions, may have over a billion data elements, and are solved on supercomputers that can analyze quadrillion operations per second. The problems also include the mathematical subtleties of phase changes, mass transfer, as well as chemical, mechanical and thermal reactions.

“I have been lucky that this has been a golden age for computation,” said Wheeler.

Now, Then, and Next

“I’ve had an interesting career and I’ve enjoyed it very much,” said Wheeler. “But I never dreamed that I would be here.”

Wheeler entered the field of applied mathematics when women were practically non-existent in it.

As an undergraduate at UT she recalls entering the engineering building and having a professor in a hallway ask her, “And whom do you belong to?”

Now, she holds the University of Texas at Austin’s Ernest and Virginia Cockrell Chair and is a professor in the departments of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics, and petroleum and geosystems engineering. Before joining UT, she was the Noah Harding Professor in engineering at Rice University.

“My family certainly encouraged me,” said Wheeler. “My mother, my husband, both were very encouraging, because certainly there weren’t very many women at that time,” said Wheeler about her start in applied mathematics.

“It wasn’t uncommon to go to an applied math or finite element meeting and go to a dinner where there were 40 men and I was the only woman”

Personal drive and family support aided Wheeler throughout her career. But Wheeler attributes luck as the force that started at all.

After all, if it would not have been for a fateful roommate pairing, it’s likely that Wheeler’s career path may have gone in a completely different direction. She would have not spent decades advancing the field of applied mathematics, and mentoring dozens of graduate students who have gone on to forge their own careers. She would not have been awarded the John von Neumann medal.

Wheeler says she hopes future students of applied mathematics won’t have to be as “lucky” as she was.

“[The start of my career] just happened by circumstance, I fell into it. And people shouldn’t just fall into it,” said Wheeler, who makes a point to participate in outreach efforts toward high school students, the most recent sponsored by the Bureau of Economic Geology. “They should have exposure to it. And that’s why I’m interested in [outreach to] these small Texas towns, so at least students can be exposed to these opportunities.”

Article by Monica Kortsha

Since its inception five summers ago, the rigorous 10-week Summer Undergraduate Research Internship (SURI) Program has brought together some of the brightest minds from universities across the country.

“It doesn’t matter how bright you are if no one can understand your ideas,” said Deborah Hempel-Medina. “How you communicate is a reflection of who you are, whether talking to a friend, responding to an interview question, or presenting in front of a group of peers.”

The University of Texas at Austin’s 2013 spring graduation said goodbye to a brilliant class of engineers. UT PGE followed up with two talented students, Jennifer Agnew and Austin Basham, to learn about their post-college journey.

America’s favorite pastime, Major League Baseball, is well underway for the 2013 season with teams chasing the coveted pennant. Many University of Texas at Austin Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering (UT PGE) students and alumni are tuning into the games to watch the action unfold, but UT PGE assistant professor, Eric Bickel, is actually guiding the players’ success on the field through strategic number crunching.

Bickel’s baseball research started in graduate school at Stanford University in 1995 when he began working with the baseball team, creating data mining software, ChartMine^®. The software helped the Cardinals collect data on every pitch thrown in a game, guiding the approach to batters from opposing teams – specifically, Stanford’s rival team: the University of Southern California. Soon, the software was purchased by 300 schools across the country with about 30 percent of Division I schools using it, including UT Austin.

After graduating from Stanford, Bickel realized the decision-making aspect of the game via baseball coaches and players was not quite accurate. He began writing papers to explain players and coaches’ mistakes and how to correct the errors, increasing their victory margins.

“One paper I wrote was how to act on different pitch counts,” Bickel said. “Sometimes the batter will just let a pitch go by on purpose. If it’s three balls, no strikes, a lot of times the coach will say, ‘Don’t swing at the pitch, no matter what.’”

Bickel said most people don’t understand why a batter would take a pitch on a 3-0 count, because the likelihood of a fastball down the middle is more than 90 percent. However, Bickel’s research proves that taking a pitch on a 3-0 count increases the likelihood of a batter getting on base.

“About 38 percent of all batters eventually get on base,” Bickel said. “At 3-0, 77 percent of batters eventually get on base. Suppose you’re sitting there with a 3-0 count. If you let the pitch go by, and the pitcher throws a strike, you’re down to a 63 percent chance of getting on. If you instead put that ball in play, you only have a one-third chance of getting on base. Your choice is to put the ball in play and have a one-third chance of getting on base, or take a strike and still have a 63 percent chance of getting on base. That’s why you take it.”

Pointing out this mistake has led to Bickel becoming a household name in the baseball world. His paper gained so much attention that Evan Gattis, Atlanta Braves catcher and early front-runner for the National League Rookie of the Year Award, even mentioned his work in a June issue of Sports Illustrated.

“The Sports Illustrated coverage came out of the blue,” Bickel said. “[Gattis] emailed me sometime in January 2012 thanking me for one of the papers I had written about specific batting averages by pitch count. He told me the paper was extremely helpful and thanked me for writing it. He’s just the nicest guy. I talked with him a bit, asking him about the paper and where he was playing. He was in the minor leagues for the Braves, at the time. That was the only conversation we had, and then a friend of mine called me to tell me about the article.”

Like Gattis, many of Bickel’s students in his graduate decision making class resonate with baseball as an example of the decision making process. Analyzing baseball decisions is not as far off from engineering as it seems, Bickel said.

“Engineers are really good at breaking down complicated issues into smaller parts and putting it all together,” Bickel said. “Engineering is just an approach to thinking and decision making. Petroleum engineers, specifically, are making high risk decisions on a daily basis impacting our energy resources.”

After logging hundreds of classroom and lab hours, faculty members at The University of Texas at Austin can often be too busy to share their game-changing research and inventions that are spinning off patents and startups.

With that in mind, Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of the Ethernet and professor of innovation at the Cockrell School of Engineering, joined forces with the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce to give faculty members a platform in Austin’s entrepreneur scene. Metcalfe, who has hosted the invitation-only events since last May, saw the faculty-focused Longhorn Startup Studio as a complement to his other Longhorn Startup programs aimed at cultivating entrepreneurship at UT Austin.

Each month during an informal gathering, the regional business and entrepreneurial community gets a front-row ticket to hear about the newest products and inventions coming out of the Forty Acres. Since Longhorn Startup Studio began, 16 startups have presented to the Austin Chamber.

Held at the chamber’s downtown office, the faculty studio is a dinner-and-discussion program meant to foster collaboration and mentorship.

The faculty presentations elicit thought-provoking, sometimes critical, feedback intended to give these young companies a leg up. The hope is that the strategic guidance will stimulate new ideas to help the startups achieve commercial success.

UT Austin's Office of Technology and Commercialization, which provides faculty with extensive entrepreneurial support, helps to identify which startups are featured at the studio.

In May, three Cockrell School faculty members, including a famed Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering (PGE) Department professor, presented their companies: Thomas Milner, FemtoSurg; S.V. Sreenivasan, Molecular Imprints Inc.; and Gary Pope, Ultimate EOR LLC.

Below, Pope provides an inside scoop on his startup and how the entrepreneurial bug is enabling him to further share his innovative research:

Ultimate EOR LLC

Ultimate EOR LLC believes it has the know-how to extract more oil from existing oil fields around the world.

About two years ago, professors Gary Pope and Upali Weerasooriya decided to turn the research they were doing at the Center for Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering (CPGE) into a company focused on enhanced oil recovery (EOR). They immediately began negotiating with the Office of Technology Commercialization for exclusive licenses to the patents created from their research.

The world-renowned CPGE has developed chemicals, processes, computer models and engineering methods that no other university or company has, Pope said.

Leveraging the techniques developed at UT Austin, Ultimate EOR is able to tailor detergents, co-solvents and polymers to recover oil that cannot be recovered by conventional extraction methods.

“It’s like washing dirty clothes with a detergent, but a lot harder because the crude oil is in a rock thousands of feet under the ground, so it has to be done with specialized chemicals,” said Pope, who holds the Texaco Centennial Chair in the PGE department. “It’s a complicated recipe that’s unique to every oil reservoir.”

There’s a wave of interest in EOR techniques because of high oil prices and increased demand. Oil production from EOR reached an estimated 2.943 million barrels per day in 2013, according to a report in Reportlinker.com.

“With the new breakthroughs in chemical EOR, the potential for greatly increased oil production is huge,” Pope said.

Earlier this year, several companies invested in Ultimate EOR, and a few months ago, Charles Christopher was appointed president and CEO. Pope plans to continue his research at CPGE and teaching at UT PGE.

Executive Assistant Sandy Taylor was honored in a ceremony on Tuesday, May 14 as a recipient of one of the 2013 Cockrell School of Engineering Staff Excellence Awards, which recognizes selected non-teaching personnel who have distinguished themselves and who have contributed significantly to the effectiveness of the teaching, advising, counseling and research efforts of the Cockrell School.

Taylor joined UT Austin staff in September of 1988 and has dedicated more than 20 years of service to the Cockrell School of Engineering. She transitioned to UT PGE in 2010 to work closely with Chair Tad Patzek and oversee department staff. This is her second time receiving a Staff Excellence Award from the Cockrell School of Engineering.

"To have my efforts recognized for making the UT PGE team function smoothly and efficiently is great," said Taylor. "I got the award, but it would not have been possible without the excellence of my staff." 

In a separate ceremony four UT Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering (PGE)/Center for Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering (CPGE) staff members were presented with service awards on Monday, May 6 honoring their hard work and commitment to the department and center for at least a decade.

Moving from the College of Communications to CPGE in April 2003, Rey Casanova, senior administrative associate, received his 10-year certificate. In 2007, Casanova was both promoted to Senior Administrative Assistant and received the annual Staff Excellence Award.

Jin Lee, administrative associate, also received her 10-year certificate. Beginning as a student assistant in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Graduate Office, Lee joined CPGE in 2008 after working for the African & African American Studies Department since 2002.

Receiving his 15-year certificate, Senior Administrative Associate John Winn started his career at UT Austin in the Instructional Media Lab in 1997, which later became the Faculty Innovation Center, both part of the Cockrell School of Engineering. Winn received the “Outstanding Employee Award” in 2003 for the engineering Dean’s staff, and joined the PGE department last June. 

Arletta Tompkins, academic advising coordinator, received her 20-year certificate. After moving to Austin in 1983, she worked at UT Austin as the Director of Career Services in the Law School and joined UT PGE in 2001 as the beloved department "mom" to undergraduate students.

Every year at spring commencement, the Cockrell School of Engineering honors its alumni with the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Awards.

Statoil Gulf Services, LLC, a leading energy company in oil and gas production, partnered with The University of Texas at Austin, specifically the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering (PGE) Department and the Jackson School of Geosciences, early in 2012, on an interdisciplinary project that funds $5 million over five years for graduate student fellowships. Graduate fellows exchange data and their research experiences with Statoil as each fellow teams up with a subject appropriate research partner in Houston.

All 13 Statoil Fellows pose for a photo

On May 1, a reception was held at the UT Club to recognize the successes accomplished in the first year of the partnership and honor the talented group of 13 fellows with an award. The event also highlighted Statoil’s generous and important contributions to the university .

“This agreement has been an important step for Statoil in the US,” said Karl Johnny Hersvik, senior vice president of research and development at Statoil.  “We plan to grow our activities; talented men and women are important for further growth. 

The fellows are selected in a competitive process that considers four different areas of research interest: integration of geological, geophysical and petrophysical data in earth models; trap integrity in salt basins and sub-salt imaging and seal versus pore pressure challenges; drainage of deep marine reservoirs and static and dynamic reservoir models and drainage; and improved development of shale play drainage.

“It’s nice to be connected to a cutting edge company - it’s been a great collaboration,” said Ayaz Mehmani, a PhD student in UT PGE.  “We are working on some of the biggest energy challenges to understand the proper strategies to make production of reservoirs possible and economically feasible.”

Both Dr. Sharon Mosher, Dean of the Jackson School of Geosciences, and UT PGE Chair Dr. Tad Patzek spoke about the exceptional partnership between Statoil and UT since the beginning of the project. “Here at UT,” said Patzek, “we are very fortunate to partner with a technologically sophisticated company, enhancing our research with their insights.”

Leading energy faculty at The University of Texas at Austin shared an update on the innovative research and programs taking place on the Forty Acres during the first-ever UT Energy Summit in Houston.