Lab Partnering Service Discovery

Tim Draelos has been at Sandia for over 32 years and received his Ph.D. at UNM in 1998, focusing on constructive neural networks. He has spent the last ten years conducting deep learning R&D, including work on seismic signal detection, phase identification, and event discrimination. He chaired special sessions on Machine Learning in Seismology at the 2016 and 2017 Seismological Society of America annual meetings and 2017 American Geophysical Union fall meeting. He has taught classes on machine and deep learning and was the founder and general chair of the 1st three Sandia Machine Learning and Deep Learning Workshops, starting in 2017. He has published papers in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, Seismological Research Letters, and various machine learning conferences.

Tuan Ho is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff in the Geochemistry Department at Sandia National Laboratories. He earned his Bachelor of Engineering from Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, Vietnam and his PhD from University College London, UK. His research interests include molecular interaction/properties in natural/engineering nanoporous materials related to subsurface applications:  shale gas production, nuclear waste disposal, carbon dioxide capture and geological storage.

NETL Staff Biography

Grant S. Bromhal, Ph.D.

Senior Fellow for Geological and Environmental Sciences

Dr. Grant S. Bromhal is a Senior Fellow at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), focusing on Geological and Environmental Sciences. He leads a team that conducts novel research related to unconventional oil and gas recovery, enhanced oil recovery, carbon storage, enhanced geothermal systems, and other related issues.

Dr. Bromhal is the Technical Director of the National Risk Assessment Partnership (NRAP), work for which he and his collaborators won, in 2017, an R&D 100 award for novel software development. Dr. Bromhal is also the director of the Science-informed Machine Learning for Accelerating Real-Time Decisions in Subsurface Applications (SMART Initiative).

He has been a research engineer at NETL for more than 17 years. During that time, he has been a Team Lead in Predictive Geosciences; the U.S. DOE’s technical representative on the Multiagency Collaboration (MAC) on Unconventional Oil and Gas; and a member of the DOE working group on well integrity in response to the Aliso Canyon incident.

Dr. Bromhal earned his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and his BS/BA degree in Civil Engineering and Math from West Virginia University. He is the recipient of the 2007 Hugh Guthrie Award for Innovation at NETL, the 2010 U.S. Geological Survey Director’s Award for Exemplary Service to the Nation, and the 2011 U.S. Department of Energy Secretary’s Achievement Honor Award.

David’s work focuses on the incorporation of EM geophysical techniques into subsurface-characterization workflows, as well as advancing multi-physics data analysis, and to a lesser extent, statistically based methods of fusing multi-physics data into geologic interpretations.

Senior Chemist

Biography

Randall Winans and coworkers have developed and applied methods to understand the fundamental chemistry of complex disordered systems, such as catalysts, soot, coals, heavy petroleum, and carbons.

Chemistry is combined with characterization techniques, including mass spectrometry, NMR, and small angle X-ray scattering and spectroscopy. 

Education

Chemistry, B.S., Michigan Technological University, 1971

Physical Organic Chemistry, Ph.D., Cornell University, 1975

Awards, Honors, and Memberships

Outstanding Chemistry Alumni, Michigan Tech. University, Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1997

Henry H. Storch Award in Fuel Science, Exxon and American Chemical Society, 1988

Editorial Board, American Chemical Society Journal, Energy & Fuels

Editorial Board, Elsevier Journal, FUEL

Committee on Science, American Chemical Society, 2006-2009

Dr. Nancy Brodsky is the Manager of the Geochemistry Department at Sandia National Laboratories and Sandia’s lead for the Fossil Energy Clean Coal and Carbon Management subprogram. She received her PhD in Geophysics from the University of Colorado, and worked for industry (RE/SPEC Inc., Rapid City SD) as a project lead and geomechanics laboratory manager, primarily supporting national nuclear waste isolation programs. She joined Sandia National Laboratories in 1995 to support the Waste Isolation Pilot Plan (WIPP), Yucca Mountain, and other geoscience programs. In 2003 she joined the National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), a program sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security. She worked with the Infrastructure Complexity R&D Group and the NISAC Fast Analysis and Simulation Team (FAST), serving as the Sandia lead for FAST and as the Sandia NISAC Deputy Project Lead. She has extensive experience working in industry and in government performing and supervising technical work in regulatory environments such as the Yucca Mountain and Waste Isolation Pilot Plant projects, as well as work for the Food and Drug Administration. She was part of a team recognized by the U.S. National Committee for Rock Mechanics (under the auspices of the National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences) with an Applied Research Award for Significant Original Contribution (1999). In 2017 she became the manager of the geochemistry department.

Curtis Oldenburg is a Senior Scientist, Geologic Carbon Sequestration Program Lead, and Editor in Chief of Greenhouse Gases: Science and Technology. Curt’s area of expertise is numerical model development and applications for coupled subsurface flow and transport processes. He has worked in geothermal reservoir modeling, vadose zone hydrology, and compressed gas energy storage. Curt’s focus for the last twenty years has been on geologic carbon sequestration with emphasis on CO2 injection for enhanced gas recovery, and near-surface leakage and seepage including monitoring, detection, and risk-based frameworks for site selection and certification. Curt Oldenburg is a co-author of the textbook entitled Introduction to Carbon Capture and Sequestration.

Areas of expertise: carbon capture & storage, geothermal energy, CO2 monitoring and verification, reservoir engineering, subsurface energy storage

Carl Steefel is a Senior Scientist in the Energy Geosciences Division, Earth and Environmental Sciences Area at Berkeley Laboratory. He also serves as head of the Geochemistry Department. He has more than 30 years of experience in developing models for multicomponent reactive transport in porous media and applying them to topics in water-rock interaction, reactive contaminant transport, chemical weathering, isotopic exchange, and watershed modeling. Recent work has focused on modeling of geochemical transport and electrostatic effects in clay-rich rocks. He is the principal developer of the CrunchFlow software, which won an R&D100 Award in 2017 and was named an AGU Fellow in 2019.

Giorgia Bettin received a Bachelor in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley and a PhD, also in Mechanical Engineering, from MIT. In 2007 Giorgia joined Schlumberger-Doll Research and worked on a variety of projects related to energy harvesting, intelligent completions of oilfields and designing of ‘smart-fluids’ for ‘High-Temperature, High-Pressure’ environments. Giorgia joined Sandia in 2012 where she has worked on various projects for the Strategic Petroleum Reserves as well as wellbore integrity projects for Oil & Gas and Storage Industry. Giorgia currently manages the Geothermal Research department and program.

Anastasia G. Ilgen is a Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Geochemistry Department at Sandia National Laboratories. She is an experimental geochemist with over 10 years of relevant experience, specializing in molecular-level processes at mineral-water interfaces. She focuses on the effects of nano-scale confinement on interfacial reactions, surface-mediated redox reactions, and chemical effects on fracture. She has developed an independent project investigating redox chemistry at the clay mineral – water interfaces, while working on her Ph.D. in Environmental Chemistry at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. At Sandia National Laboratories, Dr. Ilgen has built research programs relevant to geological carbon storage, chemical-mechanical effects in geosystems, clay mineral-water interfacial chemistry, and isotopic signatures of rock fracturing. Dr. Ilgen was an Assistant Director of the BES DOE-funded Energy Frontier Research center, the Center for Frontiers of Subsurface Energy Security, which focused on multi-scale multi-physics aspects of carbon dioxide storage in subsurface systems.

Dr. Bobby Middleton is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He holds MS and PhD degrees in Nuclear Engineering from MIT. Bobby has extensive experience in complex systems modeling, Bayesian statistical models, and heat transfer and fluid flow. He holds three patents. His current research portfolio includes the use of supercritical, transcritical and compressed fluids for heat transfer, cost-effect reduction in water use at power plants, and modeling of complex dynamic systems.