Joao Lino Pereira

I am currently doing a PhD in Earth Resources in which my research encompasses the development and testing of inversion methodologies for groundwater characterization. I started by developing a geostatistical Electrical Resistivity Tomography inversion methodology. On the same topic, I am working on another inversion methodology by coupling machine learning (deep convolutional variational autoencoder) with adaptive stochastic sampling, the Particle Swarm Optimisation algorithm.

I started my academic career by doing a Bachelor’s in Biochemistry followed by a Master’s in Geomaterials and Geological Resources. In the Bachelor’s, I was part of a research team which was studying the characteristics of an antibiotic under development. In the Master’s I studied organic matter from a well in Portugal to assess its potential to generate hydrocarbons. It was during the Master’s degree, with my increasing interest in energetic resources, namely in oil and gas that I decided to specialize in Petroleum Engineering. During the Petroleum Engineering degree, I spent 6 months at the Institute of Petroleum Engineering, Heriot-Watt University where I got acquainted with stochastic history matching techniques and multi-objective algorithms, as well as bayesian inference techniques to quantify the uncertainty in forecast. In April 2019, I joined Total S.A. with a professionalization contract to work within the Project Reservoir Earth Modelling at the Research & Development division. During that year, I evaluated the impact of adding prior petrophysical knowledge using a petroelastic model (PEM) in 3D seismic inversions. I also contributed to the development of tools that evaluate the consistency of 4D seismic data and reservoir properties (static and dynamic).