Farouq-Ali, S.M.
Dr. S.M. Farouq Ali is Distinguished Professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Houston. He has over 40 years of experience in industry and academia, having served as a professor at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Alberta and the University of Regina. Considered one of the world's leading experts in reservoir engineering, oil recovery and simulation, Farouq Ali advises oil companies and various governments on oil policy and production strategies. He has authored more than 500 papers, conducted more than 200 petroleum reservoir studies and designed over 30 major oil fields projects. Farouq Ali earned his master's and doctoral degrees in petroleum and natural gas engineering from Penn State University. As a graduate student he conducted pioneering research on micellar-polymer flooding, a process in which a micelle solution is pumped into a reservoir to recover oil. The technique has since become the industry standard for enhanced oil recovery. He is also credited with some of the earliest experimental work on steam flooding, a method of injecting steam to extract heavy crude oil from an oil reservoir. Today steam injection is one of the primary enhanced oil recovery techniques in use. Farouq Ali has been honored with awards from the Society of Petroleum Engineers, the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta and the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Abou-Kassem, J.H.
Jamal H. Abou-Kassem is professor of petroleum engineering at the UAE University in the United Arab Emirates, where he has taught since 1993. Before joining the UAE University,he was associate professor of petroleum and natural gas engineering at The Pennsylvania State University (1985-1992), where he was a tenured faculty member, supervised to completion two MS and two PhD students, and served on 10 thesis advisory committees. He held posts with the Research Institute of KFUPM (1981-1984) in Saudi Arabia and Pan Canadian Petroleum Ltd. (1978-1979) in Canada. He received a BE (Cairo U., Egypt, 1970) and MS (U. of Alberta, Canada, 1975) degree in petroleum engineering, and earned a PhD degree in reservoir simulation from the U. of Calgary (Canada) in 1981. He is a co-author of
two textbooks, author/co-author of 32 technical articles in first class journals, and another 12 technical articles in symposium proceedings. His areas of expertise cover reservoir simulation, thermal and polymer EOR methods, fluid flow through porous media, and fundamental properties of natural gas. He has attended and presented numerous technical papers in international, regional, and local petroleum engineering symposiums. He has 36 years of experience in academia, research organizations, and petroleum industry. He is a member of SPE.
Islam, M. Rafiqul
M. Rafiqul Islam is currently the President of Emertec Research and Development Ltd., a company he co-founded in late 1980's. Previously, he spent over 20 years as Professor, Research Chair and Director for various Universities, including Killam Chair at Dalhousie University. He earned Diplome d'État in petroleum production engineering from Institut Algérien du Pétrole. He then attended graduate programs at the University of Texas Austin and the University of Alberta, from where he received a M.Sc. and a Ph.D., both in petroleum engineering. He has been awarded multiple awards, including the Einstein Gold Medal from the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, which is the highest honor. He has over 700 publications to his name, including dozens of books in several disciplines and multiple TV appearances within Canada and worldwide.
