Congratulations to Dr. Mawuli Afenyo on the Completion of PhD Degree
Dr. Mawuli Afenyo, supervised by Prof. Faisal Khan and Prof. Brian Veitch, successfully presented and defended his PhD thesis titled “Fate, Transport and Risk of Potential Accidental Release of Hydrocarbons during Arctic Shipping” on Jun 12, 2017. He is also part of the Joint Centre of Excellence for Arctic Shipping and Operations (CEARCTIC) sponsored by the Lloyd Register Foundation (see details on: http://www.mun.ca/engineering/crise/partners/lrfproject/). During his PhD studies, Dr. Afenyo has published five journal papers in highly reputable journals and two conference proceedings.
Dr. Afenyo joined Memorial in Spring semester 2014 following his MSc. Petroleum Engineering program at the Technical University of Turin (Politecnico di Torino), Italy and his thesis focused on the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing in oil and gas fields. He also obtained MBA degree from the University of Bologna Business School and specialised in Green Energy and Sustainable Businesses. He holds a BSc. Civil Engineering, from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in his home country Ghana. Dr. Afenyo has spent most of his five years professional life in engineering consulting, renewable energy production, recycling of e-waste and research.
His doctoral research work focussed on developing and integrating fate and transport models in a risk assessment framework. The key applications of the study are for contingency planning during accidental discharge of oil in Arctic shipping. It has the potential to provide guidance for policies on Arctic shipping operations and ship design. His work involved conducting a review of oil spill models for open and ice-covered waters. He refined current models to improve their capabilities in ice-covered waters and applied it to a potential oil spill scenario in the Arctic. He further developed a partition model to predict the concentration of the oil in air, ice, water and sediments. These models, along with a source model are integrated in a risk assessment framework for decision making on the level of risk in the Arctic marine ecosystem. In order to identify potential scenarios to consider for risk analysis, he developed a bayesian based accident scenario forecasting methodology for this purpose.
“I am particularly grateful for the opportunity to work with two of the world’s leading experts on risk and shipping. Further gratitude goes to the C-RISE to provide me the opportunity to share knowledge and research experience. The ability to work with other graduate students from the other five universities on one critical problem with different expertise and perspective has given me a good insight into the future of research. During the program I visited Dalhousie University and University of Helsinki to conduct research with their professors and students. The visit to University of Helsinki is evolving into collaborative work, where my models are plugged into a food web model to evaluate risk. I am most indebted to my family and friends for their support especially my wife Abby.”
Dr. Afenyo will continue working in Memorial as a postdoctoral fellow. Congratulations on his completion of PhD program and wish more successes in his career life.