Jennifer Miskimins named Petroleum Engineering department head
A Mines alumna, Miskimins joined the Mines faculty in 2002 and has 30 years of experience in the petroleum industry
Jennifer L. Miskimins is the new head of the Petroleum Engineering Department at Colorado School of Mines.
A Mines alumna, Miskimins joined the Mines faculty in 2002. She has 30 years of experience in the petroleum industry, starting with Marathon Oil Company as a production and completions engineer and production foreman.
“I am very honored to serve as the new head of the Petroleum Engineering Department,” Miskimins said. “In the energy industry, our department has long held an excellent reputation for the quality of students we produce but we know we cannot rest on our laurels. Our desire as a department is to lead the world in education, training, research and innovation for the responsible and sustainable acquisition and development of subsurface energy resources.”
Miskimins holds a BS from the Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology and MS and PhD degrees from Colorado School of Mines, all in petroleum engineering. She specializes in well completions, stimulation, hydraulic fracturing and associated production issues and is the founder and director of the Fracturing, Acidizing, Stimulation Technology (FAST) Consortium.
Under her leadership, the department is already looking at expanding its offerings, including an online graduate certificate in data analytics and additional online courses, Miskimins said. Changes to the undergraduate curriculum are also underway, to provide more flexibility to students “to be able to drive their education toward their own passions.”
“Our students have always been marketable, but we need to look at opportunities that might not be the traditional paths we’ve had in the past,” she said. “We need to keep our core – we need to make sure we’re still producing excellent petroleum engineers – but we need to make sure we’re expanding, too, and taking the skills we have and helping to apply them to any energy transitions in the future.”
A registered professional engineer in the state of Colorado, Miskimins currently serves on the board of trustees for the American Institute for Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers and served as the first completions technical director on the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) International Board of Directors from 2016 to 2018. She was an SPE Distinguished Lecturer in 2010-2011 and 2013-2014 on hydraulic fracturing in unconventional reservoirs. In 2014, she was awarded the SPE International Completions Optimization and Technology Award, the top technical award in her sub-discipline.
