Biography

I am currently a Research Scientist in the Energy Geosciences Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). I received a BEng in Civil Engineering in 2010 and a PhD in geotechnical engineering in 2016. During my PhD, I developed a series of novel numerical models and codes based on the numerical manifold method (NMM) covering a range of topics. These included an efficient model for analyzing free surface flow, increased-order models for high-gradient flow, advanced approaches for material interfaces across meshes, fully coupled hydro-mechanical model for dominant fractures/faults with nonlinear features, a zero-dimensional model for flow in discrete fracture networks, and full coupling of the zerodimensional flow model with geomechanics that considers opening and shearing of the fractures.

From 2016 to 2018, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at LBNL. My primary research task was to develop a numerical model for analyzing brine inclusion migration induced by heat-generating nuclear waste disposal in salt formations. Motivated by this task, I have developed a completely new C code for multicomponent flow coupled with heat transfer in dual continua. In addition, I have been developing a new numerical method named Extended Finite Volume method (XFVM) that enables conventional FVM to model geomechanics.

From 2018, I have been a Research Scientist at LBNL. I very much enjoy developing numerical models for analyzing coupled thermal-hydro-mechanical-chemical (THMC) processes in geological media, ranging from microscale for understanding fundamental mechanisms to kilometer scale for realizing adaptive control of applied energy geosciences activities such as nuclear waste disposal, hydrocarbon recovery and geothermal exploitation.