D. Nicolas Espinoza

Biography

Dr. D. Nicolas Espinoza is an Associate Professor in the Hildebrand Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He earned his Civil Engineering diploma from Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (Argentina) in 2006, and his MS and PhD degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008 and 2011. Espinoza worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Laboratoire Navier within École de Ponts ParisTech from 2012 to 2013. His primary research interests include mechanics and physics of natural porous solids and granular media, including applications for energy and the environment. The main fields of application of Espinoza's research are carbon geological storage, geothermal energy, geologic hydrogen and energy recovery from unconventionals. Espinoza has co-authored over 125 technical articles, guided 8 graduate students towards a PhD degree, served as an expert reviewer for several scientific and engineering journals, and given seminars at various leading research and educational institutions. Espinoza shares geomechanics educational content through YouTube and Github with over four-thousand subscribers and 300k views.

Espinoza's research combines analytical methods, experimental measurements, field observations and computational methods to solve thermo-chemo-hydro-mechanical coupled processes in porous media. The ultimate objective of Espinoza's research is to solve grand scientific challenges in reactive and deformable porous media with applications to energy and environmental engineering.

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