Maryam Alghannam
Ibn Rushd Assistant Professor, Earth Systems Science and Engineering
"Understanding how fluids interact with faults and fractures helps mitigate seismic hazards and guide the development of environmentally safe and sustainable subsurface energy technologies."
Program Affiliations
Biography
Dr. Maryam Alghannam is an Ibn Rushd Assistant Professor of Earth Systems Science and Engineering, as well as of Mechanical Engineering at KAUST. She is the principal investigator of the Interface Physics and Poromechanics Lab. After working as a reservoir engineer in the oil and gas industry for a few 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. Maryam studies how fluids interact with faults and fractures in the subsurface and applies this knowledge to induced seismicity and enhanced geothermal systems. Her work appears in leading journals such as Nature Communications and Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids.
Research Interests
Maryam is a scientist and an engineer with a strong interest in the mechanics and physics of fluid-solid interactions in faults and fractures. Her research focuses on developing minimal, mechanistic, and predictive models to advance our fundamental understanding of: (1) friction and slip, (2) clogging and transport, and (3) fracture processes across scales. Combining theory and numerical simulations with laboratory experiments, her group investigates problems at the intersection of energy and the environment, including induced seismicity and enhanced geothermal systems.
Education Profile
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Mechanical and Civil Engineering, California Institute of Technology, USA, 2023-2025
- Ph.D., Computational Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, 2022
- M.Sc., Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California at Berkeley, USA, 2017
- B.Sc., Petroleum Engineering, Texas A&M University, USA, 2012