UT PGE Alumnus Receives International Data Science Award
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October 18, 2021
Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering alumnus Ashwin Venkatraman (PhD ’14) received the inaugural International Data Science and Engineering Analytics Award from the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) in September.
SPE annually recognize members whose efforts have advanced petroleum technology and whose professional contributions have benefitted industry and society. The international award cited Venkatraman’s outstanding achievements in data analytics, commitment to promoting digitalization in the oil industry, and leadership creating opportunities for the industry to integrate machine learning and analytics in reservoir engineering workflows.
Venkatraman is founder and is CEO of Resermine, a startup with a unique mix of domain experts from academia and industry who have created browser-based software that integrates analytics, machine learning, reduced physics and reservoir simulations. Resermine was named one of the “Most Promising” energy startups by investors and industry experts at the Offshore Technology Conference in 2018.
Venkatraman is associate editor of the Journal of Natural Gas Science and Engineering and a reviewer of multiple academic journals. He serves on the editorial board of SPE’s new online journal Data Science and Digital Engineering (DSDE) and on its global advisory committee on Data Science and Engineering Analytics. He won SPE’s outstanding technical reviewer award in 2018 and teaches a Reservoir Applications of Analytics and Machine Learning course at SPE conferences.
Before founding Resermine, Venkatraman spent 12 years at Shell Oil in project management, reservoir engineering and technology deployment roles. He served as an associate professor in the Department of Petroleum and Geological Engineering at the University of Oklahoma in 2019–2020 and held post-doctoral appointments at Princeton University, where he led research on methane emissions, and at UT Austin’s Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, where he led next-generation modeling for reservoir characterization. He earned his BS and MS in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology–Bombay.
