Turgay Ertekin is Professor Emeritus of Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), where he has been a member of the faculty for more than 40 years. Throughout his career, Ertekin has gained extensive experience in the development and application of fluid-flow models in porous media and mathematical modeling of flow problems. He is an accomplished presenter, having delivered or participated in more than 300 invited lectures, paper presentations, and seminars. Ertekin has also published more than 300 works, including five books and five book chapters. He holds a PhD degree in petroleum and natural gas engineering from Penn State and MS and BS degrees in petroleum engineering from Middle East Technical University. Ertekin is an active SPE Distinguished Member, having held various positions on the SPE Editorial Board, including 2 years as the executive editor of SPE Formation Evaluation. He is the recipient of the 1988 SPE Distinguished Achievement Award for Petroleum Engineering Faculty, the 2001 SPE Lester C. Uren Award, the 2007 SPE A Peer Apart Award, the 2008 SPE Outstanding Associate Editor Award, and the 2013 SPE Honorary Membership Award. Ertekin is currently the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Petroleum Exploration and Production Technology.

Qian Sun is a research engineer at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. His research focuses mainly on numerical reservoir simulation and artificial-intelligence applications in reservoir engineering. Sun has authored or coauthored numerous papers for conferences and refereed journals, one book, and one book chapter. He holds PhD and master’s degrees in petroleum and natural gas engineering from Penn State and a bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering from University of Tulsa.

Jian Zhang is a PhD graduate at Penn State. His research focuses on rate- and pressure-transient analysis, numerical reservoir simulation, artificial neural networks, and neuro-simulation. He holds a PhD degree in petroleum and natural gas engineering, with a minor in computational science, from Penn State; an MS degree in chemical engineering from Miami University; and MS and BS degrees in optical engineering and optical science and information, respectively, from Beijing Jiaotong University.