PH.D. Graduate Mohammed Siddiqui wins the Dean’s Award for an Outstanding Thesis
“I want to work with the aim that my research will have direct and immediate impacts rather than thinking it will help someone someday”.
Published on the 13 May 2022
The School of Minerals and Energy Resources Engineering is proud to congratulate Dr. Mohammed
Abdul Qadeer Siddiqui for winning the Dean’s Award for an outstanding thesis in ‘Theoretical and Experimental Study of Water Loss in Shale Matrix: A Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics-based Two-Phase Flow, Damage Chemo-poroelastic Investigation’.
The Dean’s award for Outstanding Ph.D. Theses recognises Ph.D. graduates who have been commended by their thesis examiners. Dr. Siddiqui has produced a thesis that has received outstanding levels of achievement for all examination criteria and is in the top 10% of PhD theses examined.
Dr. Siddiqui was a Ph.D. candidate at UNSW and is now currently working as a Research Associate at the School of Minerals and Energy Resources Engineering here at UNSW. In this role, he co-supervises Ph.D. students and teaches fourth-year petroleum engineering students.
‘Growing up I used to see my father going to labs and conducting experiments as a chemical engineering researcher. I always ambitioned to emulate my father while growing up and I am glad UNSW provided me the opportunity’, Dr. Siddiqui says.
Prior to becoming a Ph.D. candidate at UNSW, Dr. Siddiqui completed his Bachelors and Masters degrees at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals (KFUPM) in Saudi Arabia. During an undergraduate summer internship at Baker Hughes, while working with real drilling and economics data, Dr. Siddiqui noticed that an abundant amount of time and money were being lost to problems caused by shale rocks encountered while drilling. This made him search for answers to this problem as there were no in-depth solutions which in turn created a passion for research leading to his Ph.D. admission and concurrently, his present job at the university.
Actively encoraged by his parents, he aims to spread knowledge from his research on multi-physics constitutuive theories to the next generation of engineers. We spoke to Dr. Siddiqui on his current role at the university, his Ph.D. thesis on hydraulic fracturing and how he sees the minerals industry evolving. Check out the interview.