Matthew T. Balhoff will be the next chair of the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering (PGE).
Balhoff, an expert in pore-scale modeling, reservoir simulation and microfluidics, is the Bank of America Centennial Professor in Petroleum Engineering and co-leads leads the Industrial Affiliate Program on Chemical Enhanced Oil Recovery. He joined The University of Texas at Austin in 2005, starting as a post-doctoral fellow at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences before becoming a PGE faculty member in 2007.
He succeeds Jon Olson, who led the department as the Lois and Richard Folger Leadership Chair in Petroleum & Geosystems Engineering for eight years. During that time, Olson was instrumental in establishing the department’s naming endowment, initiating the creation of the sustainable energy minor in engineering and bolstering data science education options.
Balhoff, who also serves as director of the Center for Subsurface Energy and the Environment, has authored 96 peer-reviewed publications and 42 conference papers in the areas of enhanced oil recovery, carbon storage, unconventional resource production and fundamental processes of flow and transport through porous media. He teaches courses on reservoir engineering and simulation and recently published a book, “An Introduction to Multiphase, Multicomponent Reservoir Simulation” geared towards undergraduates and first year graduate students.
He is a distinguished member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) and recipient of the SPE Lester C. Uren, UT Regents’ Teaching and Cockrell School Lockheed Martin Teaching awards. Balhoff received his B.S. in 2000 and his Ph.D. in 2005, both in chemical engineering from Louisiana State University.
