Opening Plenary Session

Dr. Jennifer L. Miskimins is a Professor and the Department Head of the Petroleum Engineering Department at the Colorado School of Mines, where she holds the F.H. Mick Merelli/Coterra Energy Distinguished Department Head Chair. Dr. Miskimins earned a BS from the Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology, and MS and PhD degrees from the Colorado School of Mines, all in petroleum engineering. She has over 35 years of experience in the petroleum industry, holding multiple positions in both industry and academic.

Dr. Miskimins currently serves as the 2026 SPE President. She was the first person to specifically represent the completions discipline on the SPE Board of Directors as the inaugural Completions Technical Director. In 2014, she was awarded the SPE International Completions Optimization and Technology Award, and in 2022, she received the SPE International Distinguished Achievement Award for Petroleum Engineering Faculty. Dr. Miskimins was the Editor-in-Chief for the 2019 SPE Monograph update Hydraulic Fracturing: Fundamentals and Advancements and would once again like to thank her coauthors, many of which are attending this conference.

Birlie Bourgeois is the General Manager of Applied Technology Solutions for Shale & Tight Basins at Chevron.

Birlie has 25 years’ experience in the oil and gas industry. Since joining Chevron in 2001, he has held numerous positions of increasing responsibility globally in the areas of asset development, operations, strategy, planning, business development, technology deployment, corporate affairs, and people management.

Birlie holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Petroleum Engineering from LSU and is a licensed professional engineer in Petroleum Engineering in the state of Louisiana. He serves on the Industry Advisory Committee to the Department of Petroleum Engineering at Louisiana State University. He is married with four daughters.

Ms. Melchert is a petroleum engineer with over 40 years’ experience in the upstream oil and gas sector including: commercial production operations, research and development, and domestic and international policy development.  She is the former Department of Energy’s (DOE) Director for Upstream Oil and Gas Research.  She began her oil and gas career with “boots in the field” in Bakersfield, CA before moving to Washington, DC where she managed the DOE’s multi-million-dollar research program in oil and gas exploration and production.  Additional assignments included working at the White House supporting the Bush-Cheney Energy Policy Task Force as part of the Energy Policy Development Group; National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling; and Transforming Produced Water from a Waste to a Resource - Water Security Grand Challenge.  She authored Chapter 2 of the textbook titled Solid-Liquid Separation Technologies:  Applications for Produced Water, CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, 2022.  

She is an alumna of the Federal Executive Institute, Charlottesville, VA; MSC Petroleum Engineering at the University of Southern California; alumna of the Women’s Executive Leadership Program in Washington, DC; and BS Soil Science, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.  Having retired from DOE in August 2021, Ms. Melchert continues her involvement in the oil and gas and subsurface sector as host of the Oil and Gas Upstream podcast, speaker, author, President of Energia Consulting LLC, serving on various advisory boards, and as a longstanding member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers International (SPE).