Michelle joined BHP in 2017 and is currently Head of Innovation enabling growth across the Petroleum Portfolio including Exploration, Appraisal, Projects and Producing assets. Michelle has over 20 years of industry experience, working in technical and leadership roles of increasing complexity and scale including management of exploration portfolio in South America, West Africa for Hess and more recently as the Head of Gulf of Mexico exploration for BHP. With a deep technical background in quantitative geophysics Michelle has also held a number of global functional support roles leading geophysical teams delivering business support, technical assurance, innovation and people development across the petroleum value chain at both Hess and BHP. She holds a BA(hons) in Earth Sciences from the University of Cambridge and a Master of Science in Petroleum Geology from the Institut Francais du Petrole.

James Hacker holds B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University in Mechanical Engineering. He has 25 years of experience with ExxonMobil. The first half of his career focused primarily on research and technology development, field pilots and development projects for heavy oil, tight gas, shale gas and EOR/IOR. The second half of his career, he was the Reservoir Manager for various development projects and producing assets in the US, Canada, Africa, Russia, Norway, UK, Kazakhstan, Indonesia and Argentina. For his entire career, James has been a strong advocate for technology development and application throughout the reservoir lifecycle. In April 2018, he was appointed Chief Reservoir Engineer.

Tom joined Talos Energy in 2018 following the merger with Stone Energy and is currently the Director of Asset Development and is responsible for development activities in Talos’ Gulf of Mexico producing assets. Prior to his current position, Tom held the position of VP, Exploration with Stone Energy where he was responsible for Stone’s exploration, development and business development functions. Tom also served as the VP, Corporate Development with responsibility for corporate planning, reserve reporting, and marketing. Tom has over 35 years of experience spanning broad managerial, reservoir engineering and financial disciplines. Tom began his career as a reservoir engineer with ARCO and Vastar after graduating from LSU with a B.S. and M.S. in Petroleum Engineering. He also holds an MBA with a concentration in Finance from Tulane University

Vasili is a co-founder and CEO of Rock Flow Dynamics (RFD) - a technology company engaged in development of integrated simulation solutions for reservoir engineers and geologists. He has a PhD in Physics from SMU, Dallas and he spent 6 years at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as Postdoctoral Fellow in High Energy Physics. He was an assistant scientist at Brookhaven National Lab and was a part of Team USA at CERN ATLAS experiment. He was the Head of Production Monitoring at Yukos Exploration and Production.