Hi, I’m Karl, a PhD in Physical Chemistry with emphasis in Colloidal Chemistry, surfactants, polymers and interfaces. I finished my PhD in 2019 and am currently working as a researcher at LABORE, a group dedicated to studying oil reservoirs, since June/2019.

Quick links

• List of publications together with some comments on them
• Education
• Other Projects

Current work and interests

My current role is main researcher for a project financed by Shell, about the use of biopolymers for enhanced oil recovery. My attributions are many and varied, but I can focus on:

• Consultancy about any chemical matters
• Data collection, data analysis, and automation.
  • I am currently working on two relatively large Python packages to streamline the data analysis of all types of experiments performed in the lab (Core-flooding, Tomography, Rheology and more). The larger package has several thousand lines of code and hundreds of unit tests.
  • I have written a variety of small scripts to automate the execution of certain repetitive tasks. This increased productivity of a certain analysis from 2 days for 1 dataset to 10 datasets per day at least.
• Literature review
• Paper writing, reviewing
• Grant writing, reviewing
• Presentations
• Internal knowledge consolidation, writing and updating internal tutorials and best-practices guides
• Experimental techniques I am currently using frequently
  • Rheology
    • Fluid viscosity and viscoelastic behavior
  • Low-field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance
    • Porous structures pore size distributions
    • Average, viscosity determination
    • Rock sample wettability alterations
  • Medical Tomography
    • Density, effective atomic number and porosity images, profiles and averages
    • Pore property distributions (volume, area, diameter and shape)
  • Two-phase core flooding
    • Efficacy determination of a certain enhanced oil recovery method, e.g. polymer flooding, compared to water flooding.
  • Densimetry
    • Fluid density
• Training and mentoring

Previously, I worked on a research project financed by Petrobras, in the same research group, where we proposed two fluids for lost circulation remediation, that were activated by an external or internal trigger.

Skills

Languages

• English: fluent
• Spanish: intermediate
• German: beginner

Research

• Proficiency in: Microsoft Word, LaTeX, Zotero/Mendeley, Inkscape, Powerpoint, Excel
• 10 years of experience in research, 3+ years as a full-time researcher
  • 11 articles published in journals
  • 1 book chapter

Experimental techniques, in order of recency

• Rheology
• Tomography
• Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, low and high field
• Two-phase core flooding
• Chemometrics
  • Design of Experiments, Principal Component Analysis, Multivariate Regression, Hierarchical Cluster Analysis
• UV-Vis, NIR spectroscopy
• Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS)
• Light scattering, DLS, SLS
• Time-resolved fluorescence
• Isothermal Titration Calorimetry
• Differential Scanning Calorimetry
• X-ray diffraction

Programming

• Python: Advanced
  • Matplotlib, numpy, pandas, scipy. Larger projects are confidential. Portfolio project, another
• Matlab: Intermediate. Projects are confidential.
• C#: beginner. Portfolio project
• HTML, CSS: beginner. Example project: this site
• git/github: beginner.

I’ve also dedicated some time helping others, providing over 75 answers on stackoverflow.