Team

  Francesco Parisio

Francesco Parisio (he/him) graduated in Civil Engineering from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 2011. After a short period in industry, he enrolled as a PhD student in Geomechanics at the Laboratory of Soil Mechanics of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), where he graduated in 2016. From January 2017 to February 2019, he was employed as a Postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Environmental Informatics at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research UFZ-Leipzig, where he performed research on supercritical geothermal systems. In March 2019 he became principal investigator of project HIGHER within a DFG-JSPS collaboration framework, in which he performed research on permeability stimulation of supercritical geothermal systems. In September 2021 he joined IDAEA-CSIC as a MSCA postdoctoral fellow on project ARMISTICE, performing research on the combination of carbon capture and storage and supercritical geothermal systems. In July 2022, he is a Software Engineer at LiveEO GmbH, where he develops artificial intelligence solutions for satellite based remote sensing applications. His research topics include geomechanics, computational mechanics, data science, software engineering and multi-physics simulations.

   Victor Vilarrasa

Victor Vilarrasa (he/him) is a tenured scientist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He is a Civil Engineer by training. He obtained his degree in Barcelona, at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). He did his master thesis at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. After two-year professional experience in the construction sector, he decided to pursue a career in academia. He did his PhD in Civil Engineering at the UPC on geologic carbon storage, during which he did a short stay at Stanford University. His PhD thesis dissertation was awarded with honors “Cum Laude” and received the Special Doctoral Award of the UPC to the most outstanding doctoral theses defended during the academic year 2011-12. He has postdoctoral experience at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where he was awarded with the competitive “EPFL Fellows” Fellowship co-funded by Marie Curie.

He was honoured with the MIT Technology Review Award to Innovators Under 35, Spain Edition 2014, for the proposal to inject CO₂ in liquid state as an energetically efficient and geomechanically stable injection concept for geologic carbon storage. As a recognition to his scientific trajectory, he received the Alfons Bayó Award to Young Researchers from the International Association of Hydrogeologists – Spanish Group in 2015; the Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award of the Energy, Resources and the Environment (ERE) Division of the European Geoscience Union (EGU) in 2018; the Chin-Fu Tsang Coupled Processes Award 2020 by the Commission on ‘Coupled Thermal-Hydro-Mechanical-Chemical Processes in Fractured Rock’ of the International Society for Rock Mechanics and Rock Engineering (ISRM) in 2020; and a Medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering (of Spain) to Young Researchers in 2021.

His motivation for his research is to provide solutions for a successful transition from the current energy market, to one with no CO₂ emissions. To achieve this objective, his research deals with geo-energy applications, especially geologic carbon storage, geothermal energy and the related induced seismicity. He is Principal Investigator of several projects to develop low-carbon geo-energies, including the prestigious Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA).