Dr. Vitaly Afanasiev is the Business Development Manager for Schlumberger Reservoir Laboratories, based in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He joined Schlumberger in 2005. During the first part of his career, Vitaly was running and, later, managing sampling operations, wellsite and laboratories analysis of fluids and rocks in Russia, United Arab Emirates, and United States. The latter part of his career has been focused on sales and commercial aspects, business development and introduction of new technologies, including digital rock analysis for rock and fluids characterization with worldwide coverage. Vitaly works to strengthen laboratories ability to provide invaluable insight into resolving the challenges that lie within assessment and characterization of state of the reservoir, to help in understanding ‘what’s next’ for the client, and to be ready to tackle the challenges that yet to manifest themselves in Energy Transition applications. V. Afanasiev holds a PhD degree in management of social and economic systems.

A geologist by background, with a Bsc. Hons. Upper 2nd Class in Geology from the University of Liverpool (1981), Craig Lindsay has 40 years of experience in the core analysis industry. After 18 years working in the lab in a wide variety of roles, Craig joined Helix RDS consultancy in 2002 and went on to found Core Specialist Services in 2010.

Core Specialist Services are a consultancy specialising in the planning, design and management of core based studies. Craig has manged more than 200 technical projects since founding Core Specialist Services.

Craig served as President of the Society of Core Analysts from 2012-13.

Craig is a member of the SPE Reservoir Technical Discipline‘s Advisory Committee - Reservoir Technology of the 21ST Century, sub-committee Core Analysis – tasked with charting the future course of the discipline of core analysis.

Special interests are in new technology – automated core logging, machine learning and artificial intelligence for core data interpretation and core visualisation in Virtual and Augmented Reality.

Dr. Yung Lee is the Director of Engineering & Technical Services for LiguidPower Specialty Products Inc. (LSPI). He has been involved in the development and evolution of drag reducing agents (DRA) technology for over 30 years, and has played an instrumental role in LSPI's 40-year track record of global DRA technology leadership. Launched under Conoco, the business continued under ConocoPhillips when the two companies merged, and under Phillips 66 when it spun off from ConocoPhillips, prior to the acquisition by Berkshire Hathaway in 2014.

Dr. Lee has been granted 5 patents around the development of new DRA products for the pipeline industry, and has written and presented numerous papers focused on fluid flow and DRA applications.

Dr. Lee holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis, a M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Texas A&M University, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Oklahoma State University. Prior to joining the business in 1988, he held a variety of positions within research and engineering for several different organizations.

Nikhil Joshi is the Director of Innovation and Technology at Talos Energy. In his current role, Nikhil is focused on energy transition and use of current O&G skillsets to be applied towards carbon capture and sequestration, hydrogen, geothermal and wind power generation, among others. He has written over 50 technical papers and presented at several events and enjoys bringing non-conventional technical and commercial solutions to non-trivial challenges.

Prabu Parthasarathy is the vice president of Intelligent Operations within the Applied Intelligence business at Wood. He completed his PhD in Mechanical Engineering and started as a Flow Assurance engineer at Wood over 19 years ago. He has led project teams in various phases of design in the Americas, Australia and India, while expanding his role into operations and management. As the vice president of Intelligent Operations, Prabu looks after a portfolio of software products and services that deal with design and operational issues in the upstream, midstream, downstream, manufacturing and multiple other industries.

Dr. Amir Alwazzan is the Production Assurance Manager for Technology & Innovation of Dragon Oil (a Member of ENOC Group). Prior to joining Dragon Oil in April 2015, he was the Flow Assurance Advisor with OneSubsea (a Cameron-Schlumberger company) based in Houston, TX, USA. He also worked for Schlumberger, McDermott Subsea, AMEC-Paragon and some other international companies, universities and institutions in different locations worldwide. During his 34 years of corporate, managerial and technical experience, Dr. Alwazzan has been involved in offshore and onshore projects in the USA, Canada, Middle East, Southeast Asia, North & West Africa and in the Caspian Sea regions at different capacities. He has authored and co-authored several technical papers and has been serving as a reviewer for three (3) peer-review international journals in the field of Petroleum Engineering, Science and Technology.

Dr. Alwazzan is a Chartered Petroleum Engineer accredited by the UK’s Engineering Council and Energy Institute and a registered EUR-ING with FEANI. He holds a PhD degree in Transient Multiphase Flow in Flowlines from the University of Malaya, Malaysia and MSc and BSc in Petroleum Engineering from Baghdad University, Iraq. Dr. Alwazzan is a member of the SPE’s JPT Editorial Review Board, Distinguished Lecturer Committee and the Production & Facilities Advisory Committee.

Bob Pearson, P. Eng., is the current SPE Technical Director for Production & Facilities. He has extensive experience includes Field Development Planning and Production Engineering for onshore, shelf and deep-water projects, as well as completions design for Conventional and Unconventional Wells. After working for 13 years for major Operators (Shell International and Petro-Canada (now Suncor)), he has spent the last 38 years working as a consult with APA Petroleum Engineering and RPS Energy, as well as his own independent companies in Singapore, Australia & Canada. He currently based in Canada and provides advisory and peer review services through Glynn Resources Ltd. Bob Pearson has a BSc. (Hons) in Mining Engineering from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the U.K. and is a registered Professional Engineer with APEGA in Alberta, Canada. He joined the SPE in Aberdeen in 1975. 

Since October 2009, Professor John McLennan has been a faculty member in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Utah. He has been a Senior Research Scientist at the Energy & Geoscience Institute and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Utah since January 2008. He has a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Toronto, awarded in 1980. Before joining the University of Utah he had more than twenty-five years of experience with petroleum service and technology companies. He worked for Dowell and Dowell Schlumberger in Denver, Tulsa, and Houston, with TerraTek in Salt Lake City, Advantek International in Houston, and ASRC Energy Services in Anchorage. He has worked on projects concerned with subsurface energy recovery and storage (hydrocarbon, geothermal) in a variety of reservoir environments throughout the world.

David Curry is the R&D Technical Section Vice-Chair until October 2022.  He retired in 2017 after spending over 30 years in drilling-related research, technology development and drilling performance improvement.  David has been SPE Technical Director for Drilling and Completions, Executive Editor for SPE Drilling and Completions, Chair of the R&D Committee and Chair of the R&D Technical Section.  He is currently EUR Program Chair of the Drilling Systems Automation Technical Section.  He has had more than 50 technical papers published, holds 19 patents, and is a “Peer Apart” having reviewed more than 100 SPE papers.  He is a Distinguished Member of the SPE and a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, and has MA and PhD degrees from Cambridge University.

Bryan graduated with an honours degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1988. Following two years working with a Drilling Contractor, he returned to university graduating with a Masters in Petroleum Engineering. He has held Drilling Supervisor, Engineering, Superintendent and Drilling Manager positions in Operators. 

He then joined Robert Gordon University in 2017 in a business facing role delivering and creating courses that optimize the skill sets of well engineering personnel for well control and high risk critical operations using numerical drilling simulators. The university environment coupled with a career in well engineering enabled the research and development for Automated Well Control. 

In 2018, Bryan co-founded Safe Influx Ltd, the first company to provide fully Automated Well Control. He is Managing Director at Safe Influx.

Deep Joshi is a Research Engineer at Corva. He has a Ph.D. in Petroleum Engineering from Colorado School of Mines. He joined Corva in 2021 as an intern in 2019 and 2020 and full-time in 2021. He has a bachelor's in Petroleum Engineering from PDEU, India and a Masters in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Houston. His research focuses on Directional drilling, drilling automation, and data science.

Ross Weiter has over 30 years of experience in all areas of the upstream oil and gas industry. This includes time spent in concept engineering, front-end engineering design, detail design, operation support and several years of site work. His experience includes many CCS studies for various clients such as Santos, Wesfarmers, Arctic LNG2, Woodside, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, Korea National Oil Company, BG and others. Ross spent most of his career working in Perth, Western Australia with three years in Muscat working for Petroleum Development Oman (PDO). Today he is a Principal Consultant at Advisian, where he is also the CCS Lead for the Asia-Pacific Region.

Nikhil Joshi is the Director of Innovation and Technology at Talos Energy. In his current role, Nikhil is focused on energy transition and use of current O&G skillsets to be applied towards carbon capture and sequestration, hydrogen, geothermal and wind power generation, among others. He has written over 50 technical papers and presented at several events and enjoys bringing non-conventional technical and commercial solutions to non-trivial challenges.

Chuck Wright has been with NOV for 15yrs as of Oct2022 and started in ReedHycalog’s PDL (Pressurized Drilling Laboratory). He has been involved in various forms of drilling research and accelerating products to market. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Nuc Eng, MBA in general business, and an MIT degree in Advanced Technologies (agreement between NOV and MIT). He has 23yrs with US military (retired) and came out of power generation/petro chemical prior to NOV. Currently the R&D Ops Manager at NOV’s Springett Technology Center located in Navasota, Texas with his fingers in a little bit of everything these days.

Brendan Smith is Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at SeekOps. Leading up to the formation of SeekOps, Brendan conducted research at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab where his focus was on laser spectroscopy applications, leveraging intelligent autonomous aerial systems for detection of methane leak anomalies. In 2017, Brendan spun-off his research from JPL and his graduate studies on unmanned systems conducted at the Mechatronics, Embedded Systems, and Automation (MESA) Lab at the University of California, Merced to tackle a large problem in oil & gas – methane emissions. SeekOps utilizes small unmanned aerial systems for effective and accurate gas emissions monitoring.

Brendan leads a multi-disciplinary team of engineers, scientists, and software developers in the commercialization and new applications of the miniature tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS) trace-gas sensors in the energy industry. SeekOps works with major Oil & Gas and Renewable or Biogas and Landfill customers to provide rapid, comprehensive, and cost-effective drone-based methane emission measurements globally.

Nick Pinto is a Sr. Product Manager for Baker Hughes’s Methane Emission Measurement & Detection product group within the newly formed Climate Technology Solutions growth area.  

In this role he is responsible for managing both the existing technology solutions as well as the development of new solutions aimed at addressing requirements in the rapidly evolving space of emissions management. He works closely with major operators in the Oil & Gas and other industrial verticals, as well as state, national, and global regulatory agencies, and industrial standards organizations to better assist operators with technology solutions enabling their implementation of effective emissions management programs.  

Prior to his current role, Nick spent nearly 10 years with Emerson in a variety of global Product Management and Business Development roles focusing on industrial safety and gas detection, gas quality analysis, gas compositional analysis and chromatography, and continuous emissions monitoring gas analysis.  

Nick is based in Houston, TX and a graduate of University of Houston-Downtown (B.S.) and Texas A&M University (M.S.).

Jim retired from Chevron in 2013 after almost 37 years with the major International Oil & Gas Company. After moving from Houston to Colorado Springs, Colorado, Jim established the Reflections Data Consulting LLC to continue his work in the area of data management and analytics for Exploration and Production industry.  

Jim graduated from the Colorado School of Mines (BS in Geophysical Engineering in 1974 and MS in Geophysics in 1976) before joining Chevron in Denver, Colorado. He later earned an MBA degree (1996) from Our Lady of the Lake University (San Antonio, Texas).  

In 1999, Crompton was elected to the position of chair of the general committee of PIDX (Petroleum Industry Data Exchange), the API electronic commerce subcommittee. Jim was able to influence the direction of the standards setting activities towards emerging technologies, such as XML, and new electronic business models in the energy industry.  

Crompton worked on the IT merger integration organization study team in 2001 as part of the Chevron & Texaco merger which developed the IT organization structure and IT strategic direction for the corporation where he received a President's Award for this activity.  

In acknowledgement of his contributions in applications of information technology to business problems and in working to develop industry standards in electronic data exchange, Jim was named a Chevron Fellow in 2002 and served as the chair of the Fellows Network from 2006-2008.  

Jim was a Distinguished Lecturer for the Society of Petroleum Engineers in 2010-2011, speaking on the topic of “Putting the Focus on Data.”  

In 2013, Jim co-authored a book, titled The Future Belongs to the Digital Engineer with Dr. Dutch Holland, focusing on the issues of the impact of emerging digital technology on oil and gas operations, the workforce impact of the Digital Engineer and the change management challenges of trying to adopt this kind of transformational change on a large organization. Jim worked with Dr. Steve Cooper, president of EnergyIQ on a new book titled “The Digital Journey of the Oil and Gas Industry” (2019).  

In 2017, Jim was named as the PNEC Cornerstone award winner for career accomplishments in data management. Jim serves on the PPDM Denver Leadership team to help organize the activities of this local group. Jim was also selected to be on the board of the SPE Digital Energy Technology Section (DETS) and is chair of the Digital Transformation committee under DETS. Jim serves as Technical Editor and previously served as an Associate Editor for SPE publications.  

Jim works with the Payne Institute of Energy Policy in areas of application of data analytics to issues around Responsible Gas and Methane Abatement.  

In October 2019, Jim received the SPE’s International Award recipients for Management and Information discipline. SPE’s awards are intended to recognize those members who’ve contributed exceptional service and leadership to the society, as well as those who’ve made major professional contributions to their technical disciplines at the international level.

Darcy W. Spady, P.Eng, is the Managing Partner of Carbon Connect International, a company that specializes in emissions reduction;training, baseline measurement, quantification,and de-carbonization implementation. As the 2018 SPE (Society of Petroleum Engineers) International President he represented SPE personally in 49 different countries. Spady has an extensive background in the natural gas, oil, and heavy oil segments of the industry. He also serves on several boards in various positions; General Magnetic (cleantech), MNP Petroleum and EnAct (energy poverty awareness). Spady presently serves as the Industry Chair for the Remediation & Reclamation program at Olds College in Alberta, Canada. He has a B.Sc. in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Alberta.

Jason Pitcher is the CEO of North American Automation, where he is actively involved in developing automation solutions for onshore oil and gas operations. He has 30 years of experience in the upstream oil and gas industry, beginning in the drilling discipline and working in research and development for drilling, completions and production. Jason has served twice as a DL and is currently a member of the SPE DL committee and has published over 20 SPE papers and articles related to technology. He holds a degree in geology from the University of Derby and a masters degree in Mineral Exploration from Imperial College, London.

Anthony Allison is a Senior Artificial Lift Advisor for Occidental Oil & Gas, where he provides in-house support for the analysis, optimization, and troubleshooting of sucker rod pumps globally.  He has thirteen years of experience with sucker rod pumping systems, and currently serves as chairman of API Subcommittee 11, which oversees standards related to artificial lift equipment.  Anthony has previously served as chair of the SPE Artificial Lift Conference and Exhibition-Americas and as an SPE Distinguished Lecturer.  He holds a bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering Technology and master's degree in Petroleum Engineering, both from Texas A&M University.

Larry W. Lake is a professor in the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin where he holds the Shahid and Sharon Ullah Chair.  He holds BSE and PhD degrees in Chemical Engineering from Arizona State University and Rice University, respectively. He is the author or co-author of more than 100 technical papers, four textbooks and the editor of three bound volumes. Lake has served on the Board of Directors for the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), won the 1996 Anthony F. Lucas Gold Medal of the AIME, the Degoyer Distinguished Service Award in 2002, and has been a member of the US National Academy of Engineers since 1997.   He won the SPE/DOE IOR Pioneer Award in 2000. 

Srikanta Mishra is the Technical Director for Geo-energy Modeling and Analytics at Battelle Memorial Institute, the world's largest independent contract R&D organization. His recent work on multiple applied research and field demonstration projects has focused on physics-based and data-driven modeling for performance prediction and field data interpretation of geological CO2 storage, as well as extensions of reservoir analysis concepts for hydrogen underground storage. Mishra is the recipient of the 2022 Data Science and Engineering Analytics Award and the 2021 Distinguished Member Award from SPE, and also served as SPE Distinguished Lecturer for 2018-19 on the topic of Big Data Analytics.  He is the author of 200+ technical publications, one text book and three edited volumes on various aspects of data analysis and modeling for subsurface energy resource management. He holds a BTech degree from IIT(ISM) Dhanbad, an MS degree from The University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD degree from Stanford University – all in Petroleum Engineering.

Ram R. Ratnakar is a Subject Matter Expert of thermodynamics/PVT and a Sr. Researcher in R&D - Mathematics and Computation discipline in Shell International Exploration & Production Inc., Houston, Texas. He is serving as Editor-in-chief of Upstream Oil & Gas Technology Journal, Editorial advisor of J. of Natural Gas Science and Engineering, and a member of few SPE’s advisory committees: Reservoir Technical Discipline (RAC), Data Science and Engineering Analytics (DSEA), and Geothermal Energy (GE). He received his B.Tech. in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from University of Houston, Texas, USA. He has served as technical reviewer of various prestigious peer review journals, authored more than 50 technical articles, and contributed significantly to the areas of multiscale modeling, reactive-transport, PVT and new energy technologies such as hydrogen, dense energy careers, carbon capture and utilization, and electrification.