Maša Prodanović, an associate professor in the Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, earned two prestigious industry awards this month — she was named a Distinguished Member from the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), and she was awarded the Alfred Wegener Award from the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE).
The SPE Distinguished Member Award is given to just 1% of the society’s members. Established in 1983, the award recognizes members who have attained eminence in the petroleum industry or the academic community or who have made significant contributions to SPE. Prodanović will be honored at SPE’s Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in September. Previously, Prodanović received SPE’s Regional Formation Evaluation Award in 2019 and its Faculty Innovative Teaching Award in 2014.
The Alfred Wegener Award is presented to an EAGE member who has made an outstanding contribution over time to the scientific and technical advancement of the association’s disciplines, particularly petroleum geoscience and engineering. The award citation recognizes Prodanović’s work on understanding flow in porous media, including image analysis and topology to quantify pore structure and fluid displacement, multiscale analysis of complex pore systems combined with sophisticated rock classification, and nanoscale flow studies of shale. “Like Wegener himself,” the citation states, “[Prodanović] is a scientist of considerable imagination, unafraid to pursue new ideas.”
Prodanović is the UT PGE Chevron Centennial Teaching Fellow in Petroleum Engineering. Her research interests include multiphase flow and image‐based porous media characterization, especially applied to heterogeneous media, level set method, ferrohydrodynamics, sediment mechanics/fracturing and unconventional resources. She holds a B.S. in applied mathematics from the University of Zagreb in Croatia and a Ph.D. in computational applied mathematics from Stony Brook University. She was named to the Texas Exes' annual Texas Ten professors list in 2017.
