Zuleima Karpyn, associate professor and Quentin E. and Louise L. Wood Faculty Fellow in Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering will serve as the interim director of the EMS Energy Institute for one year while Director Chunshan Song is on sabbatical leave. Dean William Easterling, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, announced that Karpyn’s appointment will officially begin July 1, 2013. She has already been working closely with the Institute’s leadership.
Karpyn has been active with the EMS Energy Institute for many years and is currently the petroleum and natural gas program director at the EMS Energy Institute. In addition, she is co-director for the Center for Quantitative X-ray Imaging (CQI), located in the Institute. Karpyn is an expert on multiphase flow and transport phenomena in porous media, as well as digital rock physics, including applications in reservoir engineering, unconventional resources characterization, underground hydrology, and environmental remediation. Her research group studies multiphase flow and transport phenomena in porous media to improve the representation and prediction of hydrocarbon recovery processes, underground pollutant migration, carbon sequestration, and the natural flow of ground water. She uses X-ray computed microtomography to characterize structural properties of porous media, rock fractures, mineralogy, and to monitor fluid-fluid and fluid-rock interactions in dynamic systems.
Karpyn holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Universidad Central de Venezuela, and master’s and doctoral degress in petroleum and natural gas engineering from Penn State. In 2003 she became an instructor in the Department of Energy and Geo-Environmental Engineering at Penn State and in 2005 she became an assistant professor for the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering (former Department of Energy and Geo-Environmental Engineering).
Karpyn has over 55 publications in refereed journals and non-refereed conference proceedings and has been the recipient of several awards both within and outside of Penn State. She received the 2005 Penn State Wilson Research Initiation Grant, the 2008 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award granted by the National Science Foundation, the 2008 Outstanding Service Award for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists – Eastern Section, and the 2010 Penn State Wilson Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Karpyn is an active member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, the Society of Core Analysts, the American Chemical Society, and the American Geophysical Union. In addition, she has been involved with several technical conferences as program committee member, technical review committee member, and session chair. She is also associate editor for the Society of Petroleum Engineers Journal, and has served as a guest editor for the International Journal of Oil, Gas and Coal Technology for a special issue on Pore-Scale Flow and Transport Processes in Petroleum Reservoirs, 2010 to 2011. From 2004 to 2009, Karpyn served as the elected chair of the scholarship program for the Pittsburgh Petroleum Section of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, and from 2003 to 2009, she was the faculty advisor for the Penn State Student Chapter of the Society of Petroleum Engineers.
“Zuleima has been leading the petroleum and natural gas program and co-directing CQI at the EMS Energy Institute for several years. I am sure she will be an excellent and capable interim director,” said Song.