FACULTY NEWS
Awards and Recognition
• SPE presented Jim Crompton, PE
Professor of Practice, with the
Management and Information
Award at the ATCE awards
ceremony at ATCE 2019 in Calgary.
• Linda Battalora was awarded a
Ben L. Fryrear Endowed Chair for
Innovation and Excellence. Dr.
Battalora will spend the next three
years working to increase alumni
engagement on campus. She hopes
to accomplish this by creating alumni affinity groups to help
Jim Crompton with his award
at ATCE.
effectively connect alumni with Mines. Undergraduate students
will also be surveyed to determine what student needs are and
identify potential paths of development to meet those needs.
• Will Fleckenstein was named project manager for our partnership
with Nazarbayev University.
• Dr. Yu-Shu received the Mines Senior Faculty Award, which honors
faculty members with 10 or more years of self-directed research.
• Denver Business Journal named Dr. Jennifer Miskimins one of the
top Women in Energy.
• Dr. Bill Eustes was selected to receive the regional 2020 SPE
Distinguished Achievement Award for Petroleum Engineering
Faculty. This recognizes superior teaching, excellence in research,
significant contributions to the petroleum engineering profession,
and/or special effectiveness in advising and guiding student.
• Every semester at graduation we have the PE students nominate
faculty for the Steven Enger Award to recognize excellence in
teaching and mentoring. This year Dr. Xiaolong Yin received it in
the fall and Dr. Jennifer Miskimins received it in the spring.
project was invaluable, especially when we needed to move to remote learning. We thank Bill, Curt and John for all their help and support to our students this Spring 2020 semester. Additionally, we valued the participation of teams from Noble Energy , IPT Energy Services , and Oxy during the progress report meetings and final presentations.
Research Tidbits
• Dr. Philip Winterfeld completed a project with NREL “Geothermal
Reservoir Modeling with TOUGH2-EGS,” which was part of the
EGS-Collab SIGMA-V project.
• Drs. Yu-Shu Wu, Jennifer Miskimins and Philip Winterfeld are
working on project entitled “Laboratory and modeling studies
of cryogenic fracturing/cooling processes around boreholes with
liquid nitrogen.” Newcrest Mining’s Lihir gold mine, in Papua, New
Guinea, is in a seismically active area and the ground is hot due to
this activity. Part of the gold mining process is to drill boreholes
and place explosives into them for detonation. The hot ground
causes thermal degradation of the explosives, and we are studying
minimizing this degradation by injecting liquid nitrogen into the
boreholes in order to cool them.
• Dr. Philip Winterfeld, Dr. Yu-Shu Wu and other faculty are thrilled
to have installed a new cluster, EMGCluster2, which contains
twelve nodes and 768 processors.
• Daniel Croce, PhD ‘20, is joining us as a post-doc thanks to funding
from the Mines Foundation to work on the Proof of Concept of
his thesis to continue research: “Intermittent Gas Lift for Liquid
Loaded Horizontal Wells in Tight Shale Gas Reservoirs”.
• Faraj Ahmed, Phd ‘20, is also joining us as a post-doc to work on a
Chevron proppant transport in horizontal wellbores project.
Personal News
• Bill Eustes has a new doctorate in the family. His daughter,
Alicia, successfully defended her dissertation at the University
of Utah. Alicia graduated with her doctorate in Microbiology and
Immunology and moved on to the University of Iowa in Iowa City
as a post doctorate. Her dissertation title was “Platelets in Action:
Response to Long-Term Stimulation from Golgi Stack Formation to
Heparanase Translation and Function”.
Drs. Yin and Miskimins at the fall and spring graduation celebrations
where they recveived Enger Teaching Award recipients.
Classroom News
• For PEGN439 Multidisciplinary Petroleum Design class, we count
on the technical support from the following industry experts: Bill
O’Brien , Curt Golike and John Barber. The guidance provided
by our industry experts to our students during the senior design
Dr. Winterfeld and family relaxing at a lake near Breckenridge, CO.
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