Dr JAVIER VILCÁEZ
PROFESSOR
BOONE Pickens School of Geology
Oklahoma State University

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CV_Vilcaez_10_2025

News

07/31/2026: Javier Vilcaez (PI) has been awarded a $954,636 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Life and Environments Through Time program to conduct research on “Biogenic hydrogen production under geological carbon storage conditions”.
05/30/2026: Javier Vilcaez has been awarded a $25,000 Internal Seed Grant by the Hamm Institute for American Energy – OSU to conduct research on “Supercritical CO₂-enhanced microbial oil removal integrated with dolomite‑mediated metals recovery from produced water”.
05/09/2026: Manuscript “Dolomite filtration for lithium and cobalt recovery from produced water: Feasibility and mechanistic insights” by Unigwe and Vilcáez has been accepted for publication in Hydrometallurgy.
04/28/2026: Marwa Elshebli won the E. Rusell Lloyd Scholarship through the West Texas Geological Foundation (WTGF) in the amount of $1,000.
04/28/2026: Chinanu Unigwe won the E. Rusell Lloyd Scholarship through the West Texas Geological Foundation (WTGF) in the amount of $1,000.
04/01/2026: Marwa Elshebli won the 2026 Outstanding Geoscience Student Award from the Geoscience Foundation of Tulsa. The award is $1,500.
03/25/2026: Shaluka Senevirathna was offered a paid summer internship position at the Kansas Geological Survey (University of Kansas in Lawrance, KS).
11/03/2025: Manuscript “Investigating the impact of meteorological factors on sea-level variability in the northwestern Arabian Gulf: a case study using deep learning and advanced statistical models for enhanced forecasting” by Alhallaf, Vilcáez, and Liang has been accepted for publication in Ocean Modelling.
10/14/2025: Manuscript “Lithium and cobalt recovery from petroleum produced water using dolomite: impact of pH, temperature, and surface area” by Elshebli, Vilcáez, and Smay has been accepted for publication in Science of the Total Environment.
09/30/2025: Manuscript “Predicting sea level variations for early warning Using SARIMA model and deep learning techniques in the northwest Arabian Gulf” by Alhallaf, Vilcáez, and Lafta has been accepted for publication in Discovery Geosciences.
06/14/2025: Marwa Elshebli received a GSA Research Grant through the Alexander & Geraldine Wanek Fund in the amount of $3,000.
04/30/2025: Javier Vilcaez was selected as a Faculty Fellow of the Hamm Institute for American Energy.
04/22/2025: Marwa Elshebli was awarded the John Emery Adams Scholarships in the amount of $2,000. This scholarship is offered through the West Texas Geological Foundation (WTGF).
04/09/2025: Shaluka Senevirathna has been awarded the Oklahoma Geological Foundation Graduate Fellowship in the amount of US $2,500.
04/03/2025: Shaluka Senevirathna won the 2025 Outstanding Geoscience Student Award from the Geoscience Foundation of Tulsa. The award is $1,500.
04/03/2025: Chinanu Unigwe won the 2025 Outstanding Geoscience Student Award from the Geoscience Foundation of Tulsa. The award is $1,500.
12/21/2024: Manuscript “Biogenic hydrogen production from oil hydrocarbons at geological carbon storage conditions” by Javier Vilcaez and  Emranul Chowdhury has been accepted for publication in Energy Conservation and Management.
08/9/2024: Marwa Elshebli has been selected as a recipient for a GSA South Central Section Student Travel Grant (GSA Connects 2024 in Anaheim, CA). The award is in the amount of $300.00.
06/12/2024: Chinanu Unigwe was awarded the Adams Scholarship in the amount of $1,000. This scholarship is offered through the West Texas Geological Foundation (WTGF).
06/06/2024: Marwa Elshebli was awarded the Women in GeoScience (WinGS) Scholarship in the amount of $3,000. This scholarship is offered through the West Texas Geological Foundation (WTGF).
05/24/2024: Manuscript “Augmenting X-ray micro-CT data with MICP data for high resolution pore-scale simulations of flow properties of carbonate rocks” by Olubukola Ishola and Javier Vilcaez has been accepted for publication in Engineering Science Engineering.
03/27/2024: Emranul Chowdhury was awarded the Oklahoma Geological Foundation Geology Fellowship in the amount of $3,000.
03/26/2024: Chinanu Unigwe was awarded the Oklahoma Geological Foundation Geology Fellowship in the amount of $5,000.
03/26/2024: Chinanu Unigwe was awarded a $250 travel grant from the South-Central Section of the Geological Society of America.
03/25/2024: Javier Vilcaez was selected for the Fulbright U.S. Scholar award to Bolivia in academic year 2024-2025. Teaching & Research project:Energy transition and mining of critical minerals for energy in Bolivia.
12/19/2023: Manuscript “The role of alkalinity on metals removal from petroleum produced water by dolomite” by Khalid Omar and Javier Vilcaez has been accepted for publication in Applied Geochemistry.
12/15/2023: United States Patent awarded to Javier Vilcaez.

09/19/2023: Manuscript “Transport of Ba, Sr, Cd, Pb, and As in dolomite saline aquifers injected with petroleum produced water” by Khalid Omar and Javier Vilcaez has been accepted for publication in Geoenergy Science and Engineering.
04/28/2023: Olubukola Ishola has been chosen as the winner of the Holistic Science Prize ($3,000 doctoral prize) awarded by Department of Mathematics and College of Arts and Sciences.

Left: Interim Dean OSU CAS: Dr. Keith Garbut, Right: Dr. Olubukola Ishola

12/01/2022: Manuscript “Removal of oil hydrocarbons from petroleum produced water by indigenous oil degrading microbial communities” by Valentine Ezennubia and Javier Vilcaez has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Water Process Engineering.
08/18/2022: Olubukola Ishola received a Society of Petrophysicists and Well Log Analysts (SPWLA) Foundation Scholarship for the 2022-2023 academic year in the amount of $1,500.
08/10/2022: Javier Vilcaez (PI) has been awarded a $398,478 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Environmental Engineering program to conduct research on “Removal of metals from petroleum produced water by dolomite”.
07/22/2022: Manuscript “Statistical and neural network analysis of the relationship between the stochastic nature of pore connectivity and flow properties of heterogeneous rocks” by Olubukola Ishola, Aaron Alexander, and Javier Vilcaez has been accepted for publication in Journal of Natural Gas Science and Engineering.
06/10/2022: Olubukola Ishola was awarded a scholarship from the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) for the 2022-2023 academic year in the amount of $7,309.
05/12/2022: Olubukola Ishola was awarded one of the John Emery Adams Scholarships in the amount of $4,000. This scholarship is offered through the West Texas Geology Foundation (WTGF).
05/04/2022: Khalid Omar has been selected to receive the 2022 American Association of Petroleum Geologist Foundation (AAPG) Grants-in-Aid award in the amount of $3,000.
04/04/2022: Olubukola Ishola received the the 2022 Outstanding Geoscience Student Award from the Geoscience Foundation of Tulsa in the amount of $1,900.
04/02/2022: Manuscript “Machine learning modeling of permeability in 3D heterogeneous porous media using a novel stochastic pore-scale simulation approach” by Olubukola Ishola and Javier Vilcaez has been accepted for publication in Fuel.
03/29/2022: Javier Vilcaez delivered a talk at the AAPG Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage Conference held in Houston, Texas.
03/25/2022: Olubukola Ishola received the Dr. Homer & Mrs. May Tang Graduate Fellowship  in the amount of $1,900.
02/22/2022: Manuscript “Removal of toxic metals from produced water by dolomite filtration” by Khalid Omar and Javier Vilcaez has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Water Process Engineering.
09/02/2021: Khalid Omar was awarded 2nd best student poster presentation at the 2021 AAPG Mid-Continent Conference.
06/10/2021: Olubukola Ishola received a Society of Petrophysicists and Well Log Analysts (SPWLA) Foundation Award in the amount of $1,500.
04/26/2021: Khalid Omar has been awarded a Oklahoma Geology Foundation (OGF) Fellowship in the amount of $2,500.
04/23/2021: Olubukola Ishola has been awarded a Oklahoma Geology Foundation (OGF) Fellowship in the amount of $2,500.
04/07/2021: Javier Vilcaez (sole PI) has been awarded a $282,444 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Hydrologic Sciences (HS) program to conduct research on “Pore-scale machine-learning modeling of flow and transport properties of carbonate rocks”.
08/11/2020: Olubukola Ishola has been selected as the recipient of a $1,000 General Scholarship sponsored by Oklahoma City Section of Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE).
03/31/2020: Javier Vilcaez has been awarded a $25,000 research grant by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) (b) program to conduct research on “A new dolomite filtration technology to remove heavy metals and NORM from produced water”.
03/24/2020: Olubukola Ishola has been selected as a grant recipient ($3,000) for the 2020 American Association of Petroleum Geologist Foundation (AAPG) Grants-in-Aid Program.
02/02/2020: Fourth manuscript on geological carbon storage of Babak Shabani has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Natural Gas Science & Engineering.
01/02/2020: Manuscript on produced water disposal by Javier Vilcaez has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Contaminant Hydrology.
11/27/2019: Olubukola Ishola was awarded a third-place prize of $500 for his app idea FlowCalc 1.0. Oklahoma State University’s annual “From Research to App Competition”.
10/17/2019: Javier Vilcaez delivered an invited talk at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Midwest Regional Meeting (MWRM)