Russell Johns

Dr. Russell T. Johns is the George E. Trimble Chair of Energy and Mineral Sciences at the Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering at Penn State. He 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 all SPE technical journals from 2018–2020.   He was director of the Enhanced Oil Recovery consortium in the EMS Energy Institute at Penn State until 2020. He recently served as interim head of the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering from 2023 – 2024, managing over 60 faculty, 10 staff, and 1000 affiliated undergraduate and graduate students.

Before his current position at Penn State, 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 B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Northwestern University and M.S. and Ph.D. 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. 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, the prestigious IOR Pioneer Award from SPE in 2022, and the highest technical award from SPE in 2023, the Anthony F. Lucas Gold medal.