Career development

SPE Spotlight on Young Professionals: Mohamad Yousef Alklih

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This month’s spotlight focuses on a member who has shown a huge amount of engagement in SPE activities and embodies its ethos to transfer knowledge to the younger generation and engage with the oil and gas community.

Mohamad Yousef Alklih is a 26-year-old working as a reservoir engineer at the Abu Dhabi Company for Onshore Petroleum Operations, UAE. He holds BSc and MSc degrees with honors in petroleum engineering from the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi and has been an active member of SPE for 8 years.

Alklih’s interest in oil and gas was a natural progression given his curiosity in math and modeling subjects from an early age. For him the industry offers a prestigious environment to develop his career while still offering flexibility and exciting worldwide opportunities.  Alklih became an SPE member in 2009 after networking with the faculty adviser of his student chapter and seeing his older colleagues progressing with SPE by taking part in events and paper contests and gaining experience by traveling and networking at different conferences.  

“It is clear to me now that the benefits of becoming an active SPE member are way more than what I knew a few years back. SPE today is genuinely a platform that is keeping our industry together; through its huge online E&P resources, such as OnePetro and PetroWiki, hundreds of conferences, young professional and student programs, and social contributions such as ‘SPE Cares.’ SPE has made our industry community well connected.”

Alklih has shown his own engagement with SPE by mentoring, making presentations for Energy4me, participating in student paper contests, and through teamwork for PetroBowl. He is now clear what his future in the industry will be. In the short term he aspires to become a technical lead in reservoir engineering, while in the long term he aims to hold more decision-making positions, where he can have a greater influence in serving this industry and connecting with its people.

The purpose of “Spotlight on Young Professionals” is to share exemplary voluntary contributions and technical achievements of young professionals with their peers. To recommend a young professional you know or suggest your own achievements submit using our online form.