SPEAKERS BIOGRAPHIES

Professor at Universidad de Medellin 
AGEOCOL President

Emily was appointed Area Exploration Manager Central and North America in Total E&P in September 2018, following the acquisition of Maersk Oil. Emily is responsible for the regions conventional exploration activities. The assignment marks a return for Emily and her family to Houston.  Emily has 17 years of experience in the oil and gas industry after completing her Masters in Petroleum Geology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.  Emily joined Kerr-McGee in Aberdeen, an American independent oil and gas company, that was subsequently acquired by Maersk Oil in 2005.  Emily started her career as a geologist in the UK sector of the North Sea covering both exploration and new field developments, focussing on deepwater clastic reservoirs.  In 2009 Emily moved to Houston as a senior geologist exploring for hydrocarbons in the Brazil (Santos and Campos) and the US Gulf of Mexico. In 2013, Emily relocated to Copenhagen, Denmark and held team lead positions managing exploration activities in Greenland, Kurdistan and Kazakhstan. In 2016, Emily became Head of Kenya and Ethiopia Exploration responsible for the management of Maersk Oil’s exploration acreage in Kenya and exploration strategy for East Africa.  

Adriana is working in the New Ventures America group of PGS looking after Latin America and Caribbean opportunities after spending almost 10 years in Asia Pacific, conducting new business predominantly in Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. Prior to that Adriana's focus was on new venture business in West Africa and started out in the seismic industry as an offshore Geophysicist 20 years ago. Adriana holds a MSc in Natural Materials, a BSc in Applied Geoscience Engineering from the University Paul Sabatier, Toulouse France, and a BSc. in Geology from the University of Barcelona, Spain.   

Ana B. Ramirez received the B.E.E degree from the Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS), Colombia; and the PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Delaware, USA. She is currently Full Professor of the Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering department at Universidad Industrial de Santander, in Colombia. Her fields of interest include acoustic signal processing applied to medical and geophysical data. Her active fields of research are full waveform inversion of medical and geophysical data, and compressive sensing and sparse signal processing. She has published more than 20 papers in the areas of interest. Also, she has lead several research projects funded by UIS, Colciencias, Ecopetrol and the US Reseach Army Lab.

Veronica Perez is a graduate of Simón Bolívar University in Caracas with a Bachelor’s degree in Geophysical Engineering and a Master's degree in Earth Sciences focused on Petroleum Geosciences. Veronica joined CGG in October 2013 as a Geophysicist for the Seismic Processing team in Caracas.  In February 2015 she joined the CGG GeoSoftware Team in Villahermosa Mexico, and since April 2016 she serves in Bogotá, Colombia as regional technical support for Jason, Hampson Russell, Insight Earth and Powerlog in Latin America.

Anglia has 30 years of experience working as an exploration and filed development geoscientist in the Gulf of Mexico, West Africa, Egypt, China, and Norway. She received her B.S. degree in Geology from Khon Kaen University, Thailand. She also earned a M.S degree in Geological Engineering (geophysics focused) from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. 

During her career, she has worked for both small domestic and large international companies. She started her career at Amoco Production Company as a geophysicist based in Houston, TX- where she worked on Egypt, China and Gulf of Mexico Subsalt projects. Eni later recruited her to lead their GOM Deepwater projects and was later transferred her to work in Norway for a few years. During her time at Eni, she made over 300 MMBOE discoveries in Mississippi Canyon area. After Eni, she has joined Equinor (Statoil´s) Field Development Team as a GOM subsurface lead, Noble Energy West Africa Team and Cantium -a small privately owned GOM company.

Since April this year, she has re-located with her family to Mexico City to work for Petronas Mexico where she serves as a Senior Technical Manager in charge of technology excellence and exploration program.  Petronas currently owns 10 Deepwater blocks 5 of which  are operated blocks.

When not working, she enjoys travelling and camping with her family.  

With a passion for data and analytics, Catalina Herrera has spent her entire career helping industry push beyond digitization to business transformation. She’s held both educational and technical positions, worked with state-of-the-art technology solutions across multiple industry verticals, and served as a data scientist and a SaaS technology evangelist. Today she works with Fortune 100 companies and global technology leaders on digital transformation initiatives. In 2020, her influence in the AI community in Texas resulted in her being recognized as one of the top 30 women in Artificial Intelligence Advancement. (https://blog.re-work.co/top-women-in-ai-2020-texas/).

Maria Angela Capello a renowned leader in the energy sector, expert in reservoir management, talent development, and diversity and inclusion. She was the first woman to supervise seismic crews in the jungles of Venezuela, to advance a career that spans three continents, shaping her characteristic insightful and multicultural perspective.  Her strength is an outstanding analytical and communication capacity for strategic step-changes and implementations in Talent and Leadership development, Diversity and Inclusion and women empowerment.

Maria is an executive consultant at Kuwait Oil Company, and has published 87 technical articles and is the lead author of “Learned in the Trenches – Insights on Leadership and Resilience” (2018) and  “Mentoring and Sponsoring: Keys to Success” (2020).  She received the highest individual recognition by the SPE, the Honorary Membership Award in 2019, and is recipient of the SEG Special Commendation and Lifetime Membership Awards. She is a Distinguished Lecturer of the SPE in Resilience (2020/21), chairs the SPE Business, Management and Leadership Committee, and serves as SEG Director at Large. Her passion is the empowerment of women and young in the sustainability of energy. She is a MSc of the Colorado School of Mines. 

Maria C. Guedez is the Exploration Manager for Guyana and Suriname in the ExxonMobil Upstream Business Development Company, a major division of Exxon Mobil Corporation. Prior to her current assignment, Maria served as a planning advisor for Europe, Russia and Caspian. Before that, she was the Geoscience Supervisor for the Kizomba Satellites Fields in Angola, during the Development execution and Start-Up phase. She has held a series of technical and managerial positions in exploration, development, and production projects. Maria is a native of Venezuela and holds a degree in Geophysical Engineering from the Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela, and a Masters Degree in Geoscience from Rice University in Houston. Maria is married and has two kids.

Senior Geophysics - Ecopetrol

Graduated in Physics, Master in Geophysics from the National University of Colombia and candidate for Master in Engineering - Geotechnics from the National University of Colombia.More than twelve years of experience in onshore and offshore seismic processing in time and depth, integrating different geophysical exploration methods to reduce uncertainties. And in recent years she has ventured into the application of geophysical exploration methods to characterize soils in the area of ​​Civil Engineering Geotechnics.

In the first years of her career as a geophysicist she participated in a joint project between the ANH and the National University in the geological and geophysical modeling of the eastern mountain range of Colombia.

Between 2007 and 2008 she worked as a Geophysicist carrying out Audit of processing and seismic acquisition.

From 2008-2014 Inforpetrol: Senior Processing Geophysics. Extensive experience in applying time and depth seismic data processing sequences, development and implementation of VTI time anisotropic migration flows and 2D converted wave processing sequence. With successful application in the following Colombian basins: Piedemonte, Llanos, Valle magdalena, Valle inferior, Valle superior and Putumayo.

2014-2018 PetroSeis. Senior geophysicist and for the last two years, Technical Manager of the processing center. Implementation and development of the sequence for Velocity Model Building and TTI anisotropic PSDM migration. RTM migration implementation. Regional onshore and offshore seismic processing.

Currently she works at Ecopetrol S.A as a Senior Geophysics. Technical supervision of seismic processing in time and depth, onshore and offshore. Technical support to basin assets. Integration of geophysical methods to reduce uncertainties to support decision-making of asset groups.

Lucia Torrado is a petroleum geoscientist with a B.S. in geology (’08) from the National University of Colombia, an M.S in geology (’12) and a Ph.D. in petroleum geology (’18) both from the University of Houston. She has worked as a seismic interpreter in 2008-2009 for PGS in the Cayos Basin (western Caribbean Sea), and the Pacific margin of Colombia, and in 2010 for Hocol in the Upper Magdalena Valley basin of Colombia. During her graduate studies, she interned with Shell and Talisman Energy (now Repsol), where she worked on the Llanos basin and the Austin Chalk Formation in Texas, respectively, and conducted part of her graduate work at Spectrum Geo (now TGS). She currently works as a consultant for AGI Exploration focused in the Caribbean and northern South America.

Her graduate research consisted of the integration of seismic interpretation, seismic attribute analysis, basin analysis, sequence stratigraphy and paleogeography to evaluate hydrocarbon prospectivity in the Llanos basin (onshore Colombia), the western Nicaraguan Rise (Caribbean region), and the deep-water Foz do Amazonas in northern Brazil. She has received recognition for her graduate work during the AAPG Annual Conference and Exhibition, including: “1st place student poster presentation” in 2017, “3rd place student poster presentation” in 2013, “Award of Excellence for Top 10 poster” in 2014, and “Top 15 poster presentation” in 2016 and 2012. In 2017-2018, she was the secretary for the AAPG’s graduate chapter at the University of Houston which was awarded “Best Domestic Student Chapter” in May of 2018.

Lucia currently volunteers as a reviewer for Elsevier, AAPG, GSL and SEG. She is a team leader for SEG’s WIKI translation project, an industry advisor for the AAPG’s IBA program, and an exhibitor for the Houston Geological Society (HGS), the Society of Independent Professional Earth Scientists (SIPES), and the University of Houston.

Marcela Ortin is the South America Geophysics Lead for WesternGeco, providing technical oversight to the ongoing projects in the region, and helping in the design of new Multiclient programs. She is back in the region where she started 20 years ago, after spending 5 years in London and 2 years in Houston as Area Geophysicist, focused in Ocean Bottom Seismic (OBS) and multicomponent data. In 2000 Marcela joined the WesternGeco data processing center in Buenos Aires, after study Geophysics at Universidad Nacional de la Plata. During all these years she has worked with 2D and 3D Land, Marine and OBS data from the different basins in South America, Mexico and North Sea, specializing in Elastic Earth model Building.

Exploration and Technical Manager - PERUPETRO

Eris holds a petroleum engineer degree and a MSc in reservoir evaluation and management. She has worked for operators and oil services companies for 19 years before Perupetro, the National Agency that promotes and manages oil and gas contracts in Peru. She has worked in the exploration and development of oil and gas fields in Peru, Argentina and Brazil. As technical manager in Perupetro, she has a wide overview of the current upstream activities in Peru, she lead studies and projects to encourage the exploration of promoting areas, field development and also evaluation of fields at the end of their contract or to be abandoned.