Professor Gringarten holds the chair of petroleum engineering at Imperial College in London, where he is director of the Centre for Petroleum Studies. Before joining Imperial in 1997, he held a variety of senior technical and management positions with Scientific Software-Intercomp (1983-1997); Schlumberger (1978-1982); and the French Geological Survey (1973-1977); and was a Miller Research Fellow at the University of California in Berkeley, USA, from 1970 to 1972. His research interests include fissured fluid-bearing formations; fractured wells; gas condensate and volatile oil reservoirs; high and low enthalpy geothermal energy; hot dry rocks; and radioactive waste disposal. He holds MSc and PhD degrees in petroleum engineering from Stanford University, USA; and an engineering degree from Ecole Centrale Paris, France. The author of over 80 scientific publications, he was the recipient of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) North Sea Service Award for 2009, the SPE Cedric K. Ferguson certificate for 2005, the SPE John Franklin Carll award for 2003 and the SPE Formation Evaluation Award for 2001. A member of SPE since 1969, he was elected a Distinguished Member in 2002 and a Honorary Member in 2009. He was a SPE Distinguished Lecturer in 2003-2004.

Professor Hewitt has worked on a variety of subjects in the general field of chemical engineering but his speciality for several decades now has been in multiphase flow systems. He has published many papers and books in this industrially important area and has lectured on the subject widely throughout the world. He has a wide experience of industrial application through his founding of the Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow Service (HTFS) at Harwell and through extensive consultancy and contract work. Professor Hewitt's contributions to the field have been recognised by his election to the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the US National Academy of Engineering in addition to international awards.

David Wooff is Senior Lecturer in Statistics, University of Durham, and Director of the University's Statistics and Mathematics Consultancy Unit since its establishment in 1996. His main interests are applied statistics and the application of Bayesian statistical approaches to industrial problems. These currently include Bayes linear methods for commodity trading; the next generation of methods for software testing via Bayesian graphical models; parsimonious representations of oil reservoirs; and a Bayesian approach to detecting leaks in pipelines. He has co-authored (with Michael Goldstein) a research monograph on Bayes linear methods and has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles since 2000. He sits on the scientific committee of the Knowledge Transfer Network for Industrial Mathematics, and is an editorial board member for the Open Software Engineering Journal. Recent and current research students have worked in the areas of child growth statistics; clinical data analysis and dimension reduction; Bayesian commodity trading; training evaluation; and Bayesian approaches to exploiting e-commerce traffic.

Professor Kim Parker is Emeritus Professor of Physiological Fluid Mechanics in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial. He trained at Princeton University as an aeronautical engineer specialising in combustion and rocketry, followed by experience in the Mechanics Department at Johns Hopkins University, but has been studying various aspects of haemodynamics and physiological mechanics since joining the Physiological Flow Studies Unit at IC over 30 years ago. His work in haemodynamics has included the analysis of the wave nature of flow in the arteries, the haemodynamics of the heart and the coupling of flow from the heart to the arteries, and the experimental and theoretical study of the mechanics of the deep veins of the calf. His work in connective tissue mechanics has included study of the deformation of the red-blood cell membrane, the osmotic pressure in cartilage and the physicochemical properties of elastin.

Ingénieur Civil de l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Ponts et Chaussées, Paris , 1957 ; Master of Sciences, Civil Engineering, University of Berkeley, California, 1958 ; Ph.D. 1 : " Effet des sollicitations mécaniques sur les écoulements dans certains milieux fissurés", Thèse d'Etat, INSA de Toulouse, 20 octobre 1972 ; Ph.D. 2: " Approche phéno-corpusculaire de phases et nanophases. Voies ouvertes en sciences des géomatériaux", Tectonophysique, Université Montpellier 2, 14 décembre 2005 ; Ph.D. 3: " Apport de la mécanique moléculaire et de la modélisation ab initio à de nouvelles applications en science des matériaux, géosciences et biologie", Modélisation Moléculaire, Université de la Méditerranée, 6 novembre 2009.

Research scientist at the CNRS-INSU (French National Centre for Scientific Research – Earth and Planetary Sciences Institute) in the Geosciences Research Unit, University of Montpellier, France. He received his Ph.D. degree (modeling transport in porous media) from the University of Paris VI (1993) working with Professors Ghislain de Marsily (University of Paris VI) and Guy Vasseur (University of Montpellier). He joined the Water Resource Systems Research Unit, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, for a post-doc position in 1993-1994 (Dr. Ray Mackay group) then CNRS and the University of Montpellier in 1995 to form in 2001 with Philippe Pezard a group for borehole geophysics and hydrodynamics research (LGHF). He has been the deputy director of the Tectonophysic research unit from 2004 to 2007. In 2000, he created the Experimental Resources Laboratory ICARE for investigating transport-reaction processes, from subsurface (ex: salt intrusion) to geothermal environments, and coordinated several projects focusing on underground storage of CO2 and hydrothermal/geothermal studies. He is now heading of the Transport in Porous Media group of the Geosciences research unit in Montpellier.

Velisa Vesovic's research interest is in modelling transport phenomena. The approach is to concentrate on developing models in terms of a rigorous, fundamental description of the underlying physics based on fluid mechanical, thermodynamical and heat transfer configurations. His current research is in understanding and modelling of: thermophysical properties of fluids with special emphasis on reservoir fluids; transport of chemical species in electrochemical engineering applications; and the dispersion phenomena associated with industrial or accidental release of pollutants into fluid media and their subsequent environmental impact. He has published over seventy papers and reviews in refereed scientific literature.

Professor Blunt's research interests are in multiphase flow in porous media with applications to oil and gas recovery, carbon sequestration and contaminant transport and clean-up in polluted aquifers. He performs experimental, theoretical and numerical research in many aspects of flow and transport in porous systems, including pore-scale modelling of displacement processes, and large-scale simulation using streamline-based methods. He is on the editorial board of SPE Journal, Transport in Porous Media, water Resource Research and Advances in Water Resources. He has over 100 scientific publications.