Our Team

Dr. Alan Cohen serves as business and technology executive advisor for Petrolern. He has over 40 years industry experience in leadership and senior advisory positions in upstream E&P operations, and technology development in the geosciences and subsurface engineering. He served the United States as Senior Executive in the Department of Energy, was CTO at two technology companies, and Chief Geophysicist at Royal Dutch Shell for North and South America. Alan is a recognized expert in technology integration, pore pressure prediction, and machine learning. He has done business development and led projects on all continents in over 30 countries. He serves on the Development and Production Committee of the SEG. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and a BSc from McGill University. He also served as Adjunct Professor at University of Louisiana, teaching graduate courses to geoscientists and petroleum engineers.

​

Joseph Batir, Ph.D. is a Senior Geothermal Geoscientist specializing in thermal resource characterization in sedimentary basins and geospatial analysis for greenfield resource exploration. His expertise is surface and subsurface mapping and geospatial analysis, play fairway mapping, and thermal numerical modeling to find unknown and underutilized energy resources. Dr. Batir has performed geothermal research since 2010 including projects throughout the Continental United States, Alaska, Africa, and Iceland. He will be leading the Petrolern geothermal team in thermal resource characterization, oilfield energy conversion, and play fairway analysis.

Dr. Syed Tariq is a domain expert in reservoir engineering and the Reservoir Engineering Director for Petrolern LLC. He has 42 years of experience in the oil industry. He has first-hand experience of appraisal and development activities in Eagle ford unconventional play. During his career, he managed the largest gas field in the world (North Field, Qatar) in support of the mega LNG projects and one of the largest oil fields in the world (Upper Zakum field, Offshore Abu Dhabi). He is a senior member of SPE since 1973 and served as SPE Distinguished Lecturer in 1987, as Technical Editor of the SPE Journal from 1985-1994 and Director of SPE’s Qatar section from 2003-2006. He has contributed to oilfield technology with over 50 technical papers, SPE’s monograph on Oilfield Perforating Technology and US patents. He earned the ‘Advanced Professional Skills Award’ from ExxonMobil Corporation in November 2015 for his services to advance the engineering profession in ExxonMobil. He earned a Ph. D. in Petroleum Engineering from Stanford University.

Dr. Olivier Hoffmann is a seasoned, multi-faceted drilling professional with nearly twenty years of experience in engineering and applied research in the upstream oil and gas Industry. Olivier is currently working for Petrolern as Drilling Dynamics Advisor. Prior to this, he held positions with Baker Hugues, Shell and Quantico Energy Solutions in various roles related to drilling (including drilling mechanics, dynamics, control, and automation) and artificial intelligence driven well logging. Olivier also has background in geomechanics, geology and geotechnical engineering. During his career, Olivier built a solid hands-on experience in data measurement, data processing and analysis. He received his MSc in Applied Geology from the University of Franche-Comte (France) and both MSc and PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Richard A. Esposito is a veteran of the electrical utility industry with over 30 years of experience in various roles. He is currently Southern Company’s R&D Program Manager – Geosciences and Carbon Management and lead Southern Company’s strategic initiatives for Net Zero emission using CCUS technologies. Richard has a B.S. and M.S. degree in Geology and a Ph.D. in Engineering with focus on CO2-EOR. Prior to working at Southern Company, he worked as an environmental regulator. Richard serves on the Ph.D. research faculty, in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is currently the President of the Alabama Geological Society, Chair of the Energy Division of the Geological Society of America and serves on the Executive Committee for the International Energy Agency – Greenhouse Gas Program. He also participates in research need assessments related to carbon management for the US Department of Energy and with the National Petroleum Council.

​

Dr. Ling Liu is a professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech and an elected IEEE Fellow. She directs the research programs in Distributed Data Intensive Systems Lab, examining performance, availability, security, privacy, trust, data mining, and data management issues in big data systems, cloud computing, distributed computing systems and big data powered deep learning systems. She has published over 300 international journal and conference articles. Prof. Liu is a recipient of IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (2012) and an Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor award from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2012. She has published over 300 international journal and conference articles and is a recipient of the best paper award from numerous top venues. She will consult Petrolern LLC in Task 3 and translating the developed algorithms into a software set.

Dr. Mark Zumberge is a Research Geophysicist at the University of California, San Diego.  His PhD is in physics (Univ. of Colorado) and he has spent nearly 40 years developing instrumentation to detect crustal deformation associated with earthquakes, volcanos, and sub-surface fluid movement caused both by natural gas production and CO2 sequestration. He developed a seafloor gravity surveying method that has been used on a half-dozen North Sea production fields and also has several patents on optical methods to monitor strain, tilt, and gravity changes.  In addition to his position at the university, he is president of the small consulting firm Newberry Williams, Inc.

Andrew has over 35 years’ experience in the petroleum industry, primarily in Australia, North Sea, South America, New Zealand and Libya. Andrew has worked for a variety of service companies, consultancies and operators, including Baker Hughes, Senergy, Woodside, Shell and Santos where he held both management and senior technical roles with extensive subsurface petroleum experience with expertise in all aspects of well site operations, exploration and development geology, petrophysics, and reservoir management across various types of reservoirs and diverse geological settings. Andrew is presently Principal Petrophysicist and Managing Director at ResEval Consulting Pty Ltd based in Perth (WA) and a petrophysics instructor for Petrolern.

Hoss Belyadi is a senior completion, stimulation, and data engineer with specialty in production, completions and production optimization, machine learning, and project evaluation. After working the first two years of his career as a completions engineer designing and pumping Marcellus, Utica, and Upper Devonian Shale plays, he has been a reservoir optimization engineer focusing on optimizing completions, reservoir, production, automation and ML, and economic aspects of unconventional reservoirs. He is the primary author of “Hydraulic Fracturing in Unconventional Reservoirs: Theories, Operations, and Economic Analysis, published by Elsevier. Hoss earned his BS and MS, both in Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering from West Virginia University.

Nestor Ramos is a proactive reservoir engineer and well logging expert with 15+ years of experience in oil and gas industry, specializing in high-level problem solving, downhole tool development, reservoir performance analysis, reserves estimation, and mature fields optimization. Ha has also experience with exploration and development planning and project economics, fracturing design and analysis, well testing, PVT and SCAL. He has wide experience in well logging, log analysis, and well logging tools operations and maintenance. He held several positions at Baker Atlas Logging Services, YPF S.A., Oxy, and Sinopec and currently works for Petrolern as Senior Well Logging Advisor. Nestor holds a master’s degree in petroleum engineering from Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires.

Erin Timpe is a senior attending the University of North Dakota where she is studying Geological Engineering with a minor in Mathematics. During her studies, Erin has taken an interest in renewable energy, and is helping to research the feasibility of converting North Dakotan oil wells to sources of geothermal power. She is currently exploring career options as she finishes her senior year. Erin enjoys spending her free time reading, writing, drawing, and exercising.

Manju Pharkavi Murugesu is a PhD candidate in energy resources engineering at Stanford School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences, where she is a 2019 distinguished Knight-Hennessy scholar. She graduated summa cum laude from the Colorado School of Mines with a bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering and a minor in public affairs, and a master’s degree in petroleum engineering. Manju is passionate about tackling the dual challenge of meeting global demand for energy while lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Manju’s interest in Carbon Capture, Storage, and Utilization (CCUS) has led her to study the intricate surface chemistry and physics of rocks and their interactions with reservoir fluids and injected CO₂. She aspires to reduce the uncertainties during subsurface injection and monitoring through the means of enhanced visualization achieved using super resolution convolutional neural networks. Through her research accomplishments, she won an honors enrichment award, Perdana scholar award, and several scholarship grants. She received a PETRONAS sponsorship, E-days Engineering Award, Chevron fellowship, and the Thomas Philipose Outstanding Senior Award during her times at Mines.