In this episode, I sat down with Dr. Maša Prodanović, a Croatian-born Applied Mathematician and Petroleum Engineering Professor who specializes in modeling fluid flow through porous rocks in the subsurface. Dr. Prodanović's work is integral in building our understanding of how oil reservoirs behave underground and constraining the geometry, oil content, reservoir permeability, and other critical factors in reservoir extraction. Dr. Prodanović has won a plethora of awards for her groundbreaking work in subsurface modeling as well as her teaching competency and has been recognized as a top ten faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin as well as a member of Stony Brook University's 40 under 40. Her developments in the study of fluid flow through porous media can also have significant impacts on other fields such as Carbon Capture/Storage, Hydrogeology, Biomedical Engineering, and more.

During the podcast Dr. Prodanović talks about her upbringing in Croatia, the grit and tenacity that Croatians have had to develop through their tenacious history, what it was like coming to the USA for the first time, how capillary forces interact with buoyancy and gravity to drive fluid flow, the process in which Computational Neural Networks are used to help simulate fluid flow in rocks, the importance of sharing data in the age of AI and Neural Networks, and much much more.

Mentioned Articles, Sources, and Further Reading

History of Petrinja, Croatia

What Does It Take To Automate Digital Rock Petrophysics

Data=Based Prediction Of Transport In Heterogeneous Porous Media

Transport of complex and active fluids in porous media

Nano-scale Wetting Film Impact on Multiphase Transport Properties in Porous Media

Comprehensive comparison of pore-scale models for multiphase flow in porous media

Dr. Maša Prodanović

Academic profile: https://pge.utexas.edu/facultystaff/faculty-directory/prodanovic

Personal website: https://sites.google.com/utexas.edu/masha/home

Featured Lectures: https://sites.google.com/utexas.edu/masha/news

Publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=hs_-TQoAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsKKNKel9GcI8R_FqM8v_gw

Github: https://github.com/dr-masha

For more info about this episode, or to listen to other episodes you can visit the official Heights of Humanity website: www.heightsofhumanitypodcast.com