| New Faculty
We are thrilled to welcome three new faculty members for this academic year! Drs. Kamra and Tehmasebi started in August and Dr. Bazazi will start in January.
Serveh Kamrava
Greetings,
I am very excited about the new chapter of my life at the Colora- do School of Mines. I will have the chance to work on the most exciting research topics with tal - ented students surrounded by supportive colleagues in one of the most prestigious Universi - ties in colorful Colorado!
My educational background
is in Chemical Engineering.
However, in my opinion, I have
always worked on multidisci - plinary research topics. After highschool I left home for my B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering in a city 90 miles away, and then after graduating, I started my first M.Sc. in a city that was 470 miles away. For my second master’s I moved to Texas A&M Universi - ty - 7,700 miles further. At Texas A&M University my research was on managing abnormal operations such as flare minimiza - tion for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At TAMU I had the chance to collaborate with different groups inside the U.S. as well as a research group at Qatar University. In Texas, although I missed snow and mountains a lot, however, I found amazing friends and advisors whom I am still in close contact with. That was the time I was sure that the U.S. will be home.
After graduating, I worked in the Avery Dennison Company re - search center in Los Angeles for a while. Although again I very much liked my research project and my colleagues there, that was the time I realized I want to stay in academia. Long story short, I started my Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. My research for my Ph.D. was related to developing and apply- ing machine learning algorithms for studying static and dynamic properties inside porous media. After joining the University of Wyoming, in my research lab, we continued the research and applied it to energy storage systems and other complex sys - tems. For addressing the complex phenomena in subsurface systems, we need better methods that are accurate and time- and cost-efficient. My group at Mines will address this issue by applying physics-guided machine learning to such multiscale and multiphysics problems. In addition, we will also work on energy storage systems on both small and large scales focus- ing on the porous characteristics of the system. The mentioned research areas are multidisciplinary and ideally we would col - laborate with faculty from different departments. My group will be open to collaboration with companies and individuals interested. I look forward to teaching and doing research at the Colorado School of Mines.
6 COLORADO SCHOOL OF MINES
Pejman Tehmasebi
Being around beautiful mountains and nature is one of the most relaxing and exciting things ever and there is no - where better than Colorado, in particu - lar when you work in one of the leading institutions around the world. I am very delighted to write this brief letter in the Mines PE Newsletter as a new faculty. The faculty members here are truly like a family, very supportive, and care a lot about doing fundamental research. It is sincerely my honor to be part of this amazing university.
Let me first introduce myself. My name is Pejman Tahmasebi, and I am a subsurface engineer who works on problems from micro- to continuum-scale. Before joining Mines, I was an associate professor at the University of Wyoming. I have conducted research in several institutions such as the Amirkabir University of Technology, Universi - ty of Southern California, Stanford University, The University of Texas at Austin, and California Institute of Technology on problems related to fluid flow in porous media, subsurface systems, machine learning & data analytics, geomechanics, and granular materials. Currently, I am on the editorial board of three leading journals, Computers & Geosciences , Fluids , and Water Resources Research , handling papers around the above topics.
Going through all the topics that I cover in my research group may not be possible in this brief note, but we are developing geomechan- ical models that can translate the grain-scale models into usable information that can be used in large-scale problems. In particular, we take the morphology of particles, fluid flow, and many other im - portant physics into account and plan to understand the mechanical complexities better such that we will have more accurate and well-in - formed continuum-scale modeling. To make these computations ef - ficient, and in some cases more accurate, we are also developing advanced machine learning techniques that are designed for the problems we have in geo-systems and porous media. Due to the fun- damental nature of this research, my expertise lies between different fields and departments, such as energy, water resources, materials, and also computational science.
Aside from the computational modeling, we also plan to reopen the geomechanics lab and add new equipment through which we will be able to study and also observe the mechanical interactions between particles at a grain scale. We hope the above research topics can help us to shed a light on all the unknowns and challenges we have in geo-systems and subsurface problems. The above research topics, for sure, need the great support and interest of the Mines’ alumni and we are always open to further discussions and communications.