Dr. Michael G. Hamblin
Head of Process Safety and Investigations
Woodside
Dr Michael G. Hamblin holds a BEng (mechanical) with 1st class honours and PhD from the University of Western Australia.
Early in his working life he was involved in farming, open cut gold mining and then consulting to the Oil and Gas industry.
Since joining Woodside as staff in 1997 he has held many roles including engineering, maintenance and production management positions across LNG plants, offshore platforms and dis-connectable FPSOs as well as leading the Operations division risk management, compliance and process safety assurance activities.
His was previously General Manager Quality responsible for Quality Management support across all Projects and Operations at Woodside.
Currently Head of Process Safety and Investigations Michael oversees Process Safety Management and significant HSE event investigation process across Woodside globally.
Dr. Steve Horsch
Technical Leader, Dow’s Reactive Chemicals group R&D EH&S organization, Dow
Dr. Horsch is a Fellow at Dow and is the technical leader for Dow’s Reactive Chemicals group and the R&D EH&S organization at Dow. Dr. Horsch holds a PhD, master’s, and bachelor’s in chemical engineering from Wayne State University. He has been working at Dow for more than 17 years starting as a Sr. Engineer and progressing to Associate Scientist, Senior Scientist, principal scientist, and eventually Fellow. His expertise includes but is not limited to Thermodynamic and kinetic analysis of reaction systems via adiabatic calorimetry, reaction calorimetry, differential scanning calorimetry, and heat of mixing calorimetry to determine total energy release and rate of release. His work has been instrumental in the safe design of reaction vessels, determination of safe operating envelopes, understanding thermal stability, and maximizing production.
Bridget Todd
VP, Enterprise Health, Safety and Environment
Leader, Baker Hughes
Bridget Todd leads the Health, Safety and Environment function, for Baker Hughes, commencing the position in 2022. She is responsible for leading the company’s Health, Safety and Environment management, including governance, reporting, programs and performance.
Previously Todd led Performance Excellence for Health, Safety and Environment responsible for building an integrated approach to performance management incorporating organizational learning, human performance, management systems, and governance.
Before joining Baker Hughes in 2012, she consulted to the energy and automotive industries, specializing in environmental and human health remediation and compliance. She holds BSc in Geology and is based in Houston, Texas.
Mary Gerschefski
Health, Safety, Security, and Environmental (HSSE)
Manager, Shell
Mary Gerschefski is Shell’s Health, Safety, Security and Environmental (HSSE) Manager for Emerging Technologies where her primary responsibility is growing process safety competency and driving continuous improvement in how process safety risks are managed across Technology Development for Shell. Mary joined Shell in 2011, prior roles in Shell include Technical Safety Engineering Program Manager and HSSE Manager roles for Major Capital Projects in Upstream, Downstream and Midstream businesses.
Mary is a Texas A&M graduate from the Class of 1997, holding a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering. She is a registered professional engineer in the State of Texas and her HSSE experience spans across deepwater developments, chemicals manufacturing and distribution, and renewable energies. She is dedicated to driving process safety performance through a focus on integrated solutions, increasing process safety competence at all levels in the organization, and mentoring younger professionals as they strive to be the safety leaders of tomorrow.
Dr. Mohammad Modarres
Director, Center for Risk and Reliability
Mechanical Engineering, Maryland Energy Innovation Institute
Dr. Modarres is the Nicole Y. Kim Eminent Professor at the University of Maryland. Within the A. James Clark School of Engineering of the University of Maryland. He co-founded the world’s first degree-granting graduate curriculum in reliability engineering at the University of Maryland. As the University of Maryland Center for Risk and Reliability Director, Dr. Modarres serves as an international expert on reliability and risk analysis. He has authored numerous books, book chapters, and hundreds of scholarly papers on risk and reliability engineering. His research areas are probabilistic risk assessment, materials degradation science, probabilistic physics of failure, and probabilistic fracture mechanics. His interests in risk, reliability, structural integrity and prognosis, and health management include both experimental and probabilistic model development efforts. He is a recipient of multiple awards. Dr. Modarres received his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Tehran Polytechnic, MS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, and MS and Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from MIT.
Dr. Paolo Gardoni
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
The Grainger College of Engineering: Civil and Environmental Engineering
Paolo Gardoni is the Alfredo H. Ang Family Professor and an Excellence Faculty Scholar in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also a Professor in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering in the Grainger College of Engineering, a Professor in the Department of Biomedical and Translational Sciences in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, and a Fellow and Faculty Scholar of the Office of Risk Management & Insurance Research in the Gies College of Business. Prof. Gardoni has several international courtesy appointments including at Loughborough University in the UK, the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IITG) in India, and Tongji University, Harbin Institute of Technology, and Jianghan University in China.
Prof. Gardoni is the Director of the MAE Center, which focuses on creating a Multi-hazard Approach to Engineering and was created through NSF Engineering Research Center funding. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Reliability Engineering and System Safety published by Elsevier, and the founder and former Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure published by Taylor and Francis Group. He also serves on the Editorial Board of 9 other journals and as the Associate Editor of 5 journals.
Prof. Gardoni is a member of the Board of Governors of the Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI) of the American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE), the Probabilistic Methods Committee (PMC) of the EMI, the Board of Directors of the International Civil Engineering Risk and Reliability Association (CERRA), the Advisory Council of the International Forum on Engineering Decision Making (IFED), and several national and international committees and associations that focus on risk, reliability, and resilience analysis.
His research interests include reliability, risk, and life cycle analysis; probabilistic mechanics; sustainable and resilient infrastructure; decision-making under uncertainty; performance assessment of deteriorating systems; modeling of natural hazards and societal impact; ethical, social, and legal dimensions of risk; optimal strategies for natural hazard mitigation and disaster recovery; impacts of climate change; and engineering ethics. Prof. Gardoni is the author of over 200 refereed journal papers, 28 book chapters, and 9 edited volumes, and has delivered over 70 invited, plenary, and keynote lectures. He has received over $50 million in research funding from multiple national and international agencies including the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Qatar National Research Funds (QNRF), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the United States Army Corps of Engineers.
Prof. Gardoni is the 2021 recipient of the prestigious Alfredo Ang Award on Risk Analysis and Management of Civil Infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers. The award was given for his contributions to risk, reliability, and resilience analysis, and his leadership in these fields. Prof. Gardoni has graduated 26 PhD students and 35 Master students. Several of his former students now hold faculty positions in the USA and around the world.
Trish Kerin
Director, Institution of Chemical Engineers Safety Centre (ISC)
Trish Kerin is an award-winning international expert and key note speaker on process safety leadership and the inaugural director of the IChemE Safety Centre. She leads an international team who help organisations share and learn in process safety. Trish leverages off her years of engineering and varied leadership experience to help organisations improve their process safety outcomes.
She has represented industry on many government committees and has sat on the board of the Australian National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA). She currently sits on the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center (MKOPSC) steering committee at Texas A&M University and is the Chair of the WorkSafe Victoria Major Hazards Advisory Committee.
She is a Chartered Engineer, registered Professional Process Safety Engineer, Fellow of IChemE and Engineers Australia and a Senior Member of AIChE. Trish holds a Diploma in OHS, a Master of Leadership and is a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
Her expertise has been recognised with the John A Brodie Medal (2015), the Trevor Kletz Merit Award (2018) and Women in Safety Network’s Inaugural Leader of the Year (2022). She has been named one of the “Superstars of STEM” for 2023/24 by Science and Technology Australia.
Dr. Ray Mentzer
Professor of Engineering Practice
Executive Director of the Purdue Process Safety & Assurance Center
Dr. Ray Mentzer currently serves as a Professor of Engineering Practice and the Executive Director of the Process Safety & Assurance Center at Purdue University. He teaches the Chemical Process Safety course to ~170 seniors and graduate students each year in Chemical Engineering. The Center oversees ~25 process safety research projects per year, involving ChE faculty and professors of other departments. Sponsors of the Center are from the oil & gas, chemicals, pharmaceutical, manufacturing and consulting industries. Dr. Mentzer is typically engaged in a dozen research projects per year, such as the use of Artificial Intelligence in process safety, prediction of heats of reaction of molecules of interest to the pharmaceutical industry using novel in-house software, risks associated with the production and transportation of potential fuels such as hydrogen & ammonia, hazards and root causes of catastrophic incidents across several industries, best practices in laboratory safety and development of web-based software for analysis, metrics and surveys to assess company’s organizational health, assessment of ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance) strategies of various companies & industries.
Dr. Mentzer had more than a dozen assignments during a 28-year career with ExxonMobil in research, oil & gas operations, major project design, financial planning, public affairs, and safety / health / environment / security. He retired as an Executive and then joined the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center within the Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University. There he taught the senior-level Chemical Process Safety and Oil & Gas Processing courses for eight years. He oversaw +10 graduate students with research focusing on process safety management & metrics, risk assessment, safety culture & resilience, downhole drilling safety, liquefied natural gas (LNG) safety and fire-related studies. Dr. Mentzer has been actively engaged on committees with a variety of industry associations, such as ACC, API, OGP, UKOOA and the Center for LNG.
He received his BS in Chemical Engineering at the University of Illinois (UIUC), and MS & PhD in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University.
Dr. Steven Wong
Department of Energy Senior Program Manager
Steven Wong (A&M class of 1983) is an avid technologist with over four decades of experience in the oil & gas industry. His experience includes 10 years as a production research engineer at ARCO, 20 years in Flow Assurance at ExxonMobil where he worked on large capital projects worldwide, and the rest of the time working small business startups. He is passionate about leveraging technology to improve productivity and reduce business costs. His current duties at the Department of Energy include overseeing Upstream oil & gas research and developing DOE strategies for emerging technologies.
Cai Glyn Ferguson
AtkinsRealis Principal Marine Geoscientist
Cai Glyn Ferguson is a Principal Marine Geoscientist with AtkinsRéalis, he has been involved in the design and construction of several offshore windfarms worldwide.
This experience has provided him with an acute understanding of the key operational risks, and the importance of identifying these at an early stage. He brings first-hand experience of designing out, managing, and mitigating risks throughout the whole project lifecycle.
Ignacio León Íñigo
Engineering Manager,Google Cloud
With a background driving large technology transformation projects in both Europe and the US, Ignacio León Íñigo currently leads a team of engineers at Google focused on helping AI startups implement cutting-edge solutions. Adept at translating business requirements into effective technical strategies, he has a strong background in developing and delivering cloud-based AI systems, gained through years of experience at Google and Accenture. Ignacio is a certified Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer and Project Management Professional (PMP), and holds a B.Eng. in Industrial Technology Engineering from the Technical University of Madrid, a Higher Diploma in Science in Computing from the National College of Ireland, a Postgraduate Certificate in Artificial Intelligence from The University of Texas at Austin and, in 2024, completed the Chief Technology Officer Program at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
