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Margot Gerritsen

Professor of Energy Resources Engineering, Emerita

Current Research and Scholarly InterestsResearch
My work is about understanding and simulating complicated fluid flow problems. My research focuses on the design of highly accurate and efficient parallel computational methods to predict the performance of enhanced oil recovery methods. I'm particularly interested in gas injection and in-situ combustion processes. These recovery methods are extremely challenging to simulate because of the very strong nonlinearities in the governing equations. Outside petroleum engineering, I'm active in coastal ocean simulation with colleagues from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, yacht research and pterosaur flight mechanics with colleagues from the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, and the design of search algorithms in collaboration with the Library of Congress and colleagues from the Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering.

Teaching
I teach courses in both energy related topics (reservoir simulation, energy, and the environment) in my department, and mathematics for engineers through the Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME). I also initiated two courses in professional development in our department (presentation skills and teaching assistant training), and a consulting course for graduate students in ICME, which offers expertise in computational methods to the Stanford community and selected industries.

Professional Activities
Senior Associate Dean, School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences, Stanford (from 2015); Director, Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Stanford (from 2010); Stanford Fellow (2010-2012); Magne Espedal Professor II, Bergen University (2011-2014); Aldo Leopold Fellow (2009); Chair, SIAM Activity group in Geosciences (2007, present, reelected in 2009); Faculty Research Fellow, Clayman Institute (2008); Elected to Council of Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) (2007); organizing committee, 2008 Gordon Conference on Flow in Porous Media; producer, Smart Energy podcast channel; Director, Stanford Yacht Research; Co-director and founder, Stanford Center of Excellence for Computational Algorithms in Digital Stewardship; Editor, Journal of Small Craft Technology; Associate editor, Transport in Porous Media; Reviewer for various journals and organizations including SPE, DoE, NSF, Journal of Computational Physics, Journal of Scientific Computing, Transport in Porous Media, Computational Geosciences; member, SIAM, SPE, KIVI, AGU, and APS