CO2-SMART is a collaboration between the University of Southern California (USC) and Pennsylvania State University (PSU). The Center is open to all eligible researchers and faculty across the two universities. The main research topics that are covered under the Center trust areas span diverse fields of engineering and computer science at USC, complemented by the geoscience, energy policy and economics at PSU. As such, the Center is uniquely poised to address industry and government needs in geologic CO2 storage. The Center is led by Behnam Jafarpour who serves as the Center Director and USC’s site director, and Sanjay Srinivasan who serve as the site director at PSU.
Center Director: Behnam Jafarpour
Dr. Jafarpour serves as the Principal Investigator and Director of the CO2-SMART NSF IUCRC. He contributes to multi-physics monitoring data integration, data science and analytics, risk assessment and optimization of geologic CO2 storage. Dr. Jafarpour is a Professor in the Viterbi School of Engineering, where he leads the Subsurface Energy and Environmental Systems Lab. He holds the Energi Simulation Industrial Research Chair in Subsurface Energy Data Science. Dr. Jafarpour received his Ph.D. and S.M. degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, respectively, from MIT in 2008. Dr. Jafarpour’s research focuses on developing new technologies for improved characterization, forecasting, and management of subsurface energy and natural resources by integrating advanced system-theoretic and machine learning algorithms with fluid flow and transport modeling in porous media.
PSU Site Director: Sanjay Srinivasan
Dr. Srinivasan serves as the PSU Site Director and contributes to the subsurface characterization tasks and the scale up of processes associated with the subsurface sequestration of CO2 from pore to field scale. He is the holder of the John and Willie Leone Family Chair in Energy and Mineral Engineering and the director of the Penn State EMS Energy Institute. Prior to assuming his current role, Dr. Srinivasan served as the head of Energy and Mineral Engineering at PSU. He served on the Technical Advisory board for the Alberta Ingenuity Center for In Situ Energy at the University of Calgary. He was a task leader in the Center for Frontiers of Subsurface Energy Security at UT Austin where he directed research focused on field scale characterization of geological CO2 sequestration. He specializes in geostatistical reservoir characterization and analysis of scale up of flow and transport properties and processes. His primary research focuses on reservoir characterization and improved management of reservoir recovery processes.