Keynote Speakers

MIKE SIMMONS

Technology Fellow for Geoscience & Energy Transition, Halliburton,

Mike Simmons is Halliburton’s Technology Fellow for Geoscience & Energy Transition. He has enjoyed a 40-year career associated with the energy industry, working for a supermajor, universities, and consultancies. He is well known for his expertise in Middle East geology and has published extensively on stratigraphy around the world and its applications to subsurface characterisation (e.g. “Arabian Plate Sequence Stratigraphy”). His current focus is accelerating exploration workflows whilst ensuring geological plausibility.

Abdulkader M. Afifi

Professor of Geology, KAUST

Abdulkader M. Afifi is a professor of geology at King Abdullah University of Science andTechnology since 2018. He leads the Arabian Plate Geology (APG) research group focused on the geology and natural resources of Saudi Arabia and the Red Sea. He started his career in1980 with the USGS Mission in Saudi Arabia in geological mapping and mineral exploration. He worked from 1991 until 2017 in Aramco’s Exploration Organization where he held technical and management roles in oil and gas exploration, reservoir characterization, and upstream joint ventures.

Abdulkader holds a PhD in geology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, a Masters fromthe Colorado School of Mines, and a Bachelors (high honors) from KFUPM. He also completedthe General Management Program at Harvard Business School.

He is active in professional societies as an author, lecturer, conference organizer, and field trip leader. He served for two decades as an associate editor of GeoArabia. He served theAmerican Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) as an international distinguished lecturer, council and, president of the Middle East region, and received AAPG’s DistinguishedService Award and Technical Contribution Award.

Dr. Shaoqing Sun

Founder & Chief Geoscientist, C&C Reservoirs

Dr Shaoqing Sun obtained a BSc in Petroleum Geology from Northeast Petroleum University, China in 1985 and a PhD in Reservoir Geology from University of Reading, UK in 1990. He began his professional career as Senior Research Geoscientist for Petroleum Information (1990-1992) and subsequently as Consulting Geologist for Chevron (1993-1994). Dr Sun founded C&C Reservoirs in the mid-1990s where he led a team of seasoned geoscientists and reservoir engineers who have been devoted to collecting, reviewing and synthesizing geological, reservoir engineering and production data on the world’s most important fields and reservoirs. Dr Sun has published more than 20 scientific papers and won the AAPG Excellent Poster Award in 2007.

Renas Koshnaw

Research Associate Professor. University of Göttingen

Renas I. Koshnaw is a postdoc fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA and a research associate at the University of Göttingen in Germany. His research focuses on how tectonic processes influence basin evolution, with particular emphasis on the Zagros fold‑thrust belt and its foreland basin, as well as on the broader Arabia–Eurasia convergent margin. Dr. Koshnaw received a Bachelor of Science degree in geology in 2006 from the Salahaddin University-Erbil in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. After being awarded a fellowship from the United States, he graduated with an MSc and a PhD degrees in 2016 from the University of Texas at Austin. Afterward, he conducted one-year research at the University of Bern in Switzerland as a recipient of the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship. In 2019, he was awarded the German Humboldt research fellowship and joined the University of Göttingen. Currently, he is a DAAD-PRIME fellow at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at MIT in the USA.

THAMER ALDAAJANI

General Director | Mining & Hydrocarbons Technologies Institute, KACST

Thamer Aldaajani serves as a research expert in geophysics and the general manager of the mining and hydrocarbon technologies institute at KACST. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Geophysics from King Saud University in 2008, followed by a Master of Science in Geology from the same institution in 2011, and a PhD in Geophysics from Penn State University in 2019. In 2020, he joined the Seismo Lab at Caltech as a postdoctoral scholar and has been a visiting researcher there between January 2021 until Dec 2024. Dr. Aldaajani's research focuses on the geodynamic processes of the solid Earth, including both observational and numerical modeling techniques. In terms of numerical modeling, he works at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) as a research guest in the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics group to create three-dimensional thermomechanical models that explore the evolution of the greater Red Sea region and the Arabian-Nubian Shields. He aims to leverage the geodynamic modeling perception to enhance the understanding of the regional evolution of the Afro-Arabia plate boundary over time. On the observational side, he works at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as a research guest as well to map the surface movement of western Arabia using both InSAR and GNSS time series. He aims to identify the regional processes and potential natural geohazards..