Dr. Maryam Alghannam is an Ibn Rushd assistant professor of earth systems science and engineering at KAUST and the principal investigator of the Fault Poromechanics Lab. After working as a reservoir engineer in the oil industry for several years, she returned to academia to pursue an MS degree in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in computational science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2023, she joined the California Institute of Technology as the inaugural George Housner postdoctoral fellow in earthquake engineering. At KAUST, Dr. Alghannam studies how fluids interact with faults and fractures in the subsurface and how this knowledge applies to induced earthquakes and enhanced geothermal systems. Her work appears in leading journals such as Nature Communications and the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids.​

Professor Alghannam’s research broadly spans topics from flow in porous media to friction and earthquakes. She is particularly interested in understanding how fluids interact with faults and fractures in the subsurface. An application area she has worked on extensively is induced seismicity—a central issue in the development of environmentally safe and sustainable subsurface energy technologies. At KAUST, Dr. Alghannam is expanding her investigations of fluid–fault interactions to new application areas, such as enhanced geothermal systems and nonvolcanic tremors. Her other interests include the physics of granular media and multiscale modeling of friction.​