People

RAPID Management Team

J. J. King Chair in Engineering
Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering

Research Areas: Well construction, drilling optimization and automation, remote real-time monitoring, NPT/ILT mitigation, rock-fluid interactions, wellbore geomechanics, drilling fluid design and automation, well integrity and zonal isolation, well plugging and abandonment, geothermal drilling, CCS/CCUS, well repurposing

Mitch Pryor
Senior Research Scientist
Mechanical Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering robotics.me.utexas.edu

Research Areas: Field and Service Robotics, Grasping and Manipulation, Teleoperation, Haptics, and Wearable Robots, Human-Robot Interaction, Localization, Mapping, and Navigation, Long-Term Autonomy, Motion and Path Planning, Planning, Robot Mechanisms and Design

Pradeep Ashok
Senior Research Scientist
Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering

Research Areas: Pattern recognition, real-time operation centers, decision making, Bayesian analysis, Big Data and data validation

Dongmei “Maggie” Chen
Professor
Mechanical Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering

Research Areas: Model development and controllers to mitigate undesired drillstring vibrations, modeling of well hydraulics and developing control algorithms for managed pressure drilling, automatic bit forensics analysis, and online drilling fluid monitoring and control. Expanded research in offshore clean energy generation and utilization.

Roman Shor
Assistant Professor Drilling Engineering in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering of the Schulich School of Engineering at the University of Calgary

Graduate Research Assistants

Dongyoung Yoon

Graduate Research Assistant
Petroleum Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering
Research Topic: Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) of Rig Equipment

Santiago Callerio

Ph.D. Student
Petroleum Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering
Research Topic: Kick tolerance modeling for casing design optimization

Jian Chu

Graduate Research Assistant
Mechanical Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering
Research Topic: Automated Bit Forensics and Bit Image Processing

Cinar Turhan

Graduate Research Assistant
Petroleum Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering
Research Topics: Well Repurposing: Developing a method for repurposing suitable candidate wells into geothermal, carbon storage, or hydrogen storage wells. Hole Cleaning Automation: Automating the hole cleaning by detecting the volume, size, and morphology distributions of cuttings and cavings by video processing from a camera, and point cloud data processing from a 3D laser sensor.

Yifan Zhang

Graduate Research Assistant
Petroleum Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering
Research Topic: Drilling Automation and Control, Drillstring Dynamics

Anthony Luu

Graduate Research Assistant
Mechanical Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering
Research Topic: Production Modeling and Control of Geothermal Wells

Abraham C. Montes

Ph.D Student
Petroleum Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering
Research Topic: Stuck pipe prediction and analysis is an essential component of fully automated drilling operations that remains an unreached target. My research aims to fill this gap, keeping universality and interpretability as fundamental pillars.

Kulpitcha Sudyodprasert

Graduate Research Assistant
Petroleum Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering
Research Topic: Well Integrity and Automatic Well Monitoring System. My research aims to apply data science and machine learning to well operations, facilitating automatic well monitoring and early detection of well integrity issues.