Three InterPore Award Winners announced

InterPore Meritorious Service Medal

Steffen Berg holds a MSc degree in materials science from the Saarland University, Germany. After a PostDoc at Princeton University in the Microfluidics Research and Engineering Group, he joined Shell as a staff scientist in the Netherlands. He is also a visiting reader at Imperial College London.

Steffen joined InterPore in 2011. That same year, he was involved in the creation of the Netherlands National Chapter, which was officially formed in 2012 and the first InterPore national chapter.

He successfully campaigned for making Shell an institutional member of InterPore. Through Steffen’s efforts, Shell has remained an active member and has supported InterPore conferences as a platinum sponsor.

In 2014, under Steffen’s leadership, the NL chapter joined forces with researchers from Belgium and Luxembourg and the BeNeLux chapter was formed. Steffen remained chair of Benelux chapter until 2017, and since then has remained a member of the Steering Committee.

In 2017, Steffen was directly involved in the creation of the InterPore Foundation, of which he is currently the Chair.

The time and effort invested by Steffen in InterPore have been enormous and his dedication has been unparalleled.

InterPore and InterPore Foundation congratulate Mr. Berg on this honor and wish him continued success.

Honorary Lifetime Membership Award

Dorthe Wildenschild is a professor of environmental engineering at the College of Engineering of the Oregon State University, USA, with research focused on flow and transport in porous media, addressing research questions about subsurface water pollution and energy-related storage. Recent work includes the optimization of geologic storage of anthropogenic CO2 in subsurface reservoirs; exploration of colloid-facilitated transport of contaminants in groundwater; microbial enhanced oil recovery; and investigations in support of more effective groundwater remediation techniques.

Her scientific work bridges the gap between the development of highly accurate experiments that can support and augment new theories and the development of numerical models for complex applications in the field of environmental engineering.

Dr. Wildenschild has played a very important role in the development of transformative technology, with an enormous scientific impact. She is a highly motivated environmental engineer, well regarded in the academic community and is an inspiration to a new generation of students.

InterPore and InterPore Foundation congratulate Prof. Wildenschild on this honor and wish her continued success.

InterPore Medal for Porous Media Research

Prof. Philippe Coussot is an internationally highly recognized researcher in the field of rheology of complex liquids. In particular, he has done groundbreaking work in the exploration of unconfined, bulk liquid flows by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).

Furthermore, he has significantly contributed to the physics of transport in porous media in several other fields, including understanding internal mechanisms of drying and imbibition of porous media, flow of non-Newtonian fluids in porous media, probabilistic modelling of colloid transport in porous media, bound and free water transfers in wood or cellulosic materials and internal characterization of liquid distribution and transfers in porous media.

Philippe Coussot embodies in an excellent manner the idea of interdisciplinarity of porous media research. He established fruitful links between modern experimental physics, hydrodynamics and materials science with respect to flow of complex liquids in porous media.

InterPore and InterPore Foundation congratulate Prof. Coussot on this honor and wish him continued success.