Data Analytics Career Pathways in an Evolving Energy Industry

Susan Nash is Director of Innovation, Emerging Science and Technology at AAPG. In her role, Susan works to identify products, services, companies and individuals doing innovative work, and to facilitate collaborative transfers of knowledge, skills, and ideas. The title of her talk is "Innovation in the time of COVID-19: Where are the emerging new opportunities?"

With the advent of COVID-19, and with the goal of building resilience and adaptability, she has launched webinar series and workshops on topics ranging from geosciences, analytics, additives manufacturing, imaging and the “New Space,” drones, critical minerals, open data management, energy storage, co-produced gases, economic development, and more. Further, the AAPG U-Pitch New Technology Showcase supports the launch and commercialization of new technologies.

Susan earned her Bachelor of Science, Master of Arts, and Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma. She has more than 20 years of experience launching and administering programs involving innovation, education, knowledge and technology transfer for economic and human capital development.

In addition, she is the author of numerous books and articles on instructional technology, innovation and technology, and topics in composition, rhetoric, and the humanities.

Sathish Sankaran is Executive Vice President of Engineering at Xecta Digital Labs. He leads an engineering team in the development of digital solutions for energy industry by fusing physics and data analytics methods for applications in reservoir, production, facilities, and downstream processes. The title of his talk is "Role of Hybrid Engineers in the Future of Energy."

Sathish Sankaran has over 20 years of diversified industry experience in technology development, consulting, project execution and management working on several international, deepwater, and US onshore projects. His areas of specialization include digital oilfield technologies, reservoir management, field development optimization, uncertainty analysis, production operations, and advanced process automation.

Prior to Xeta, Sathish had worked at Halliburton and Anadarko in technical consulting, product management and advisor roles in reservoir and production engineering and advanced process automation. In his most recent role at Anadarko, he led an engineering team, focused on technology development for digital operations, advanced simulation modeling and application of data analytics in upstream engineering.

Sathish is a member of Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) and served in several roles including advisory positions to the Technical Directors, chairperson and committee member in several industry initiatives, and authored industry reports on applications of data analytics in reservoir engineering.

He has a B.Eng. (Honors) degree in Chemical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS – Pilani, India), M.S degree in Chemical Engineering from University of Cincinnati and Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from University of Houston.

Liz Dennett is the AWS Lead Solutions Architect for the Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU) where she works with Energy customers to break down data silos to fuel innovation. The title of her talk is "Bravely navigating career pivots."

Liz is a passionate technologist with 12 years of experience pioneering novel technological approaches to solve pressing O&G challenges. Liz has deep domain experience in geology, geophysics, solutions architecture, and biotechnology including subsurface genomics and applied microbiology. She has demonstrated success working in roles of increasing complexity and scale spanning unconventional, deep water, and new energy applications globally. Liz holds a BS in geology from the University of Alaska Anchorage and an MS and PhD in geoscience from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she researched geomicrobiology on modern and ancient Earth as part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. Liz’s passions include building things, solving problems, and stubbornly refusing to believe things are “hard”.