September 18, 2014
Professor Mary Wheeler has been named a Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) Honorary Member, the organization's highest honor.
Wheeler, professor or aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics and petroleum and geosystems engineering, garners the prestigious title, which is limited to 0.1 percent of the SPE total membership. This elite group represents individuals who have given outstanding service to SPE or have demonstrated distinguished scientific or engineering achievements in the fields within the technical scope of SPE.
Wheeler serves as director of the ICES Center for Subsurface Modeling. Her work impacts energy production through enhanced oil and gas extraction; air quality with carbon sequestration in saline aquifers; and water quality with environmental remediation in groundwater.
Wheeler’s research group employs computer simulations to model the behavior of fluids in geological formations. Her particular research interests include numerical solution of partial differential systems with application to the modeling of subsurface flows and parallel computation.
Applications of her research include multiphase flow and geomechanics in reservoir engineering, contaminant transport in groundwater, sequestration of carbon in geological formations and angiogenesis in biomedical engineering. Wheeler has published more than 250 technical papers and edited seven books; she is currently an editor of seven technical journals.
Wheeler is a member of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Society of Petroleum Engineers. She is a fellow of the International Association for Computational Mechanics, and is a certified professional engineer in Texas. She was co-organizer of the SIAM Activity Group in the Geosciences, and alongside Dr. Hans van Duijn, started the “Journal on Computational Geosciences.”
