Emad Zaki Yehya

Emad Zaki Yehya was an Iraqi petroleum engineer, author, scholar, and a PhD lecturer at Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, Venezuela. He was born in 1955 in Baghdad, to a religious and traditional family. He graduated from the University of Baghdad with a B.S.M.E. in Petroleum Engineering in 1977, and then obtained his M.S.M.E. and PhD in Reservoir and Simulation from the same university in 1987 and 1993, respectively. He also spent some time in the United Kingdom learning English. He worked as a petroleum engineer for the Northern Petroleum Organization in Kirkuk, Iraq, and then as the head of the Reservoir Engineering Department in the Ministry of Oil of Iraq. He left Iraq in 2000 and moved to Venezuela, where he joined PDVSA, the state-owned oil company, as a senior reservoir engineer. He also became a professor and researcher at Simón Bolívar University, where he taught courses on reservoir engineering, simulation, and optimization. He was an active member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), and delivered several lectures and presentations at international conferences and workshops. He authored and co-authored many papers and books on various topics related to petroleum engineering, such as fractured reservoirs, capillary hysteresis, reservoir characterization, and simulation models. He was considered one of the founders of modern Iraqi sociology, and a pioneer in applying modern social theories to analyze the Iraqi social reality. He passed away in Caracas, Venezuela, on August 3, 2016, due to natural causes. He was 61 years old.