Scholar Highlights of the Month

Ashkan Jahanbani:

I am going to present my paper next week at the 15th European Conference on the Mathematics of Oil Recovery (ECMOR XV), 29 August - 1 September 2016 Amsterdam, Netherlands:

"Investigation of Water Diversion by a Novel Polymer Gel System for Enhancing Oil Recovery", A. Jahanbani Ghahfarokhi, J. Kleppe & O. Torsaeter

Visit Ashkans project page here.

Lina Hedvig Line:

Here are some of the highlights from the first three months as a VISTA scholar at the University of Oslo:

- The first project publication is currently at its writing stages (awaiting some final results), but will hopefully be ready for peer review by the end of December this year. The work is a description and comparison of reservoir quality in sandstone reservoirs of the Triassic interval in the southwestern Barents Sea region. This publication will be the first in a series of papers that will focus on the distribution of reservoir quality in sandstone reservoirs in this petroleum region.

- The project will also benefit from my attendance at an introduction seminar in powder X-ray Diffraction and Rietveld Refinement at Maastricht University in October. Here I will learn the basic methods for identifying and quantifying mineral phases in rock samples and how to interpret the results using state-of-the-art software tools.

- In addition to supervising two master students at the University of Oslo, I recently took part in initiating two more master thesis projects inspired by the ongoing PhD project funded by VISTA.

I am really pleased about this initiative and that the other VISTA fellows are taking an interest in my project. Best of luck to you all.

Visit Lina Hedvigs project page project page here.

Irina Korneva:

In the beginning of September I am going to attend the 88th Congresso della Societa Geologica Italiana presenting my results in the session 'new challenges in petroleum geology'. This session will be attended by people with different backgrounds both from industry and academia, which will give a nice and full overview of the most important topics and problems in petroleum geology now. My talk will be focused on dolomitization control on petrophysical properties and fracture distribution within rift-related carbonates (Hammam Faraun Fault Block, Suez Rift, Egypt). The paper based on this work is almost finished and going through the last revisions before submission.

Visit Irinas project page here.

Jack Leo:

- Conferences: I've recently attended two, the Gordon Research Conference on the Bacterial Cell Surface at Mt Snow, Vermont, USA. This was in June (26.6.-1.7.). This was an excellent conference, highly relevant to both the nanoparticle project and other side projects. It gave me many new ideas and also spawned two new collaborations. Last week, I was at the Finnish Microbial Pathogenesis meeting in Helsinki (24.-26.8.). This was less relevant for the nanoparticle project, but it was nice to keep abreast of what is going on in microbiology in Finland (my home country, after all) and meet with old colleagues. The meeting also had talks by three international top researchers, which were very interesting and relevant to side projects. At both, I presented a poster on our recent publication, The Secretion of the Intimin Passenger Domain Is Driven by Protein Folding (see below).

- We have published a paper on the secretion mechanism of a bacterial virulence factor. This has been a side project and a continuation of the work I did in Germany (indeed, much of the data was already produced there). The paper was accepted to the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and can be found at http://www.jbc.org/content/early/2016/07/27/jbc.M116.731497.abstract​.

Visit Jacks project page here.

Grace Shephard:

Grace Elizabeth shares here research highlights in her blog. Visit her blog at https://arctickoalablog.wordpress.com/arcticoceanexpedition2016/.

Visit Grace project page project page here.