Lab Partnering Service Discovery

Tim Draelos has been at Sandia for over 32 years and received his Ph.D. at UNM in 1998, focusing on constructive neural networks. He has spent the last ten years conducting deep learning R&D, including work on seismic signal detection, phase identification, and event discrimination. He chaired special sessions on Machine Learning in Seismology at the 2016 and 2017 Seismological Society of America annual meetings and 2017 American Geophysical Union fall meeting. He has taught classes on machine and deep learning and was the founder and general chair of the 1st three Sandia Machine Learning and Deep Learning Workshops, starting in 2017. He has published papers in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, Seismological Research Letters, and various machine learning conferences.

Tuan Ho is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff in the Geochemistry Department at Sandia National Laboratories. He earned his Bachelor of Engineering from Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, Vietnam and his PhD from University College London, UK. His research interests include molecular interaction/properties in natural/engineering nanoporous materials related to subsurface applications:  shale gas production, nuclear waste disposal, carbon dioxide capture and geological storage.

NETL Staff Biography

Grant S. Bromhal, Ph.D.

Senior Fellow for Geological and Environmental Sciences

Dr. Grant S. Bromhal is a Senior Fellow at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), focusing on Geological and Environmental Sciences. He leads a team that conducts novel research related to unconventional oil and gas recovery, enhanced oil recovery, carbon storage, enhanced geothermal systems, and other related issues.

Dr. Bromhal is the Technical Director of the National Risk Assessment Partnership (NRAP), work for which he and his collaborators won, in 2017, an R&D 100 award for novel software development. Dr. Bromhal is also the director of the Science-informed Machine Learning for Accelerating Real-Time Decisions in Subsurface Applications (SMART Initiative).

He has been a research engineer at NETL for more than 17 years. During that time, he has been a Team Lead in Predictive Geosciences; the U.S. DOE’s technical representative on the Multiagency Collaboration (MAC) on Unconventional Oil and Gas; and a member of the DOE working group on well integrity in response to the Aliso Canyon incident.

Dr. Bromhal earned his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and his BS/BA degree in Civil Engineering and Math from West Virginia University. He is the recipient of the 2007 Hugh Guthrie Award for Innovation at NETL, the 2010 U.S. Geological Survey Director’s Award for Exemplary Service to the Nation, and the 2011 U.S. Department of Energy Secretary’s Achievement Honor Award.

Dr. John D. Siirola is a Principal R&D Member of Technical Staff in the Discrete Math and Optimization Department within the Center for Computing Research at Sandia National Laboratories. His main areas of expertise are systems design, operations research, optimization modeling, and optimization algorithms. John’s research focuses on the intersection of computational tools with systems design and analysis; in particular, developing approaches for modeling highly structured systems, and optimization algorithms that can exploit the expressed structure.

Much of John’s research is disseminated through open-source software projects. He is the Sandia PI for the Institute for the Design of Advanced Energy Systems (process modeling, design, and optimization) and serves on the Pyomo Management Committee (optimization modeling). Previously he led the Acro project (optimization algorithms) and contributed to the Water Security Toolkit (modeling and analysis tools for drinking water distribution systems), Dakota (optimization and uncertainty quantification), Utilib, PyUtilib, gcovr, and cxxtest.

John has a B.S. from Purdue University (2000) and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University (2005), both in Chemical Engineering. He is a senior member of the AIChE, member of INFORMS, and member of the COIN-OR Foundation. John currently serves on the COIN-OR Technical Leadership Council and co-chaired the 2014 Foundations of Computer Aided Process Design (FOCAPD) conference.

Anastasia G. Ilgen is a Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Geochemistry Department at Sandia National Laboratories. She is an experimental geochemist with over 10 years of relevant experience, specializing in molecular-level processes at mineral-water interfaces. She focuses on the effects of nano-scale confinement on interfacial reactions, surface-mediated redox reactions, and chemical effects on fracture. She has developed an independent project investigating redox chemistry at the clay mineral – water interfaces, while working on her Ph.D. in Environmental Chemistry at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. At Sandia National Laboratories, Dr. Ilgen has built research programs relevant to geological carbon storage, chemical-mechanical effects in geosystems, clay mineral-water interfacial chemistry, and isotopic signatures of rock fracturing. Dr. Ilgen was an Assistant Director of the BES DOE-funded Energy Frontier Research center, the Center for Frontiers of Subsurface Energy Security, which focused on multi-scale multi-physics aspects of carbon dioxide storage in subsurface systems.