The Fall 2022 Celebrating Women in Energy and Water Research seminar series continues on Thursday, Nov. 3 with two seminars by Maša Prodanović, Frank W. Jessen Professor in Petroleum Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. The free seminars are open to Penn State faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students.
The first discussion,"Planning vs. following your gut in an unconventional career path," will be held at 11 a.m. in 402 Steidle Building. Prodanović will talk through her life in academia, how she learned to follow her 'inner compass' to find a village of support and when to throw away the plan to explore unconventional paths.
The second talk,"Predicting porous media flow and transport coefficients: open data, simulation and machine learning," will be held at 4 p.m. in 401 Steidle Building.
The technical seminar will cover how deep-learning algorithms and open-source code have paved the way for breakthroughs in upscaling the computationally intensive framework of properties such as permeability, diffusion coefficients, or the electrical resistivity of rocks. Prodanović will present the latest work, demonstrating how the technological progress has cut down estimation time to seconds, changing how large numbers of samples can be explored based on microstructure imagery. The processes also change how properties are researched in other complex porous structures such as foams, batteries or fuel cells and microvascular networks.
Prodanović is an award-winning, applied mathematician-turned-engineer and has expertise in direct simulation of flow and particulate transport in porous and fractured media, porous media characterization primarily based on 2D and 3D images of rock microstructure, unconventional resources and data curation. She was elected as an InterPore Society Council member as the Program Director for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics' Activity Group on Geosciences for 2021-23.
