Russell Johns

Russell T. Johns is the George E. Trimble Chair of Energy and Mineral Sciences at the Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. He recently served as Chair of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering Program from 2015 to 2018, Distinguished SPE Lecturer for 2019 – 2020, and Editor-In-Chief for SPE technical journals from 2018 - 2020.  

Prior to his current position, he served on the petroleum engineering faculty at The University of Texas at Austin from 1995 to 2010. He also has nine years of industrial experience as a petrophysical engineer with Shell Oil and as a hydrogeologist for Colenco Power Consulting in Baden, Switzerland. He holds a BS degree in electrical engineering from Northwestern University and MS and PhD degrees in petroleum engineering and water resources from Stanford University. He has over 250 publications in enhanced oil recovery, thermodynamics and phase behavior, unconventional gas engineering, multiphase flow in porous media, and well testing. Dr. Johns received the SPE Ferguson medal in 1993, the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) Distinguished Member award in 2009, the SPE Faculty Pipeline award in 2013, the 2016 SPE international award in Reservoir Description and Dynamics, the Wilson Excellence in Research award from the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences in 2018, and the prestigious IOR Pioneer Award from SPE in 2022. He is currently director of the Enhanced Oil Recovery consortium in the EMS Energy Institute at Penn State University.