After successfully defending her PhD dissertation on July 20, I am so proud to say that Wu Hao is now known as Dr. Wu Hao! And with that, all of us at the Computational Geofluids Lab send our warmest, heartiest, and happiest congratulations to Wu Hao for a phenomenal PhD dissertation, and a wonderful run through graduate school. Wu Hao joined the lab group as a PhD student in January 2016. Her PhD dissertation is a collection of three individual, but related studies traversing a scientific discipline in transition. And Wu Hao is at the forefront of this sea change. Wu Hao’s third dissertation chapter is among the very first studies that use physics-based models to train neural networks how to emulate CO2 storage in geologic reservoirs. You might be asking what that word-soup actually means. Well, Wu Hao built an artificial intelligence that can predict what happens when CO2 is pumped into geologic formations. So, when the robots take over the world, I suppose Wu Hao will be partially responsible…but in the meantime, I’m going to sit back and marvel at her groundbreaking work in numerical modeling and simulation. And in doing so, she’s won awards, grants, and scholarships, notably the 2019 Applied Machine Learning Fellowship at Los Alamos National Lab; she’s mentored MS students in the lab, taught groundwater hydrology labs & lectures; she’s taught me about machine learning and artificial intelligence; and she’s authored or co-authored five peer-reviewed journal articles. She’s been such a wonderful presence in my lab for so long that I could sing her praises for hours. But for the sake of brevity, I’ll close here by extending to Wu Hao my sincerest wishes for much future success.
And a closing note for Dr. Wu Hao: My commitment to your success does not end with graduation - I am and will continue to be your friend, mentor, and, most importantly, letter-writer, whether you’re across town or on the other side of the world.
Good Luck, Fist Bumps & Hugs. :-) --RMP
