Silvia De Simone

Silvia De Simone is a Ramón y Cajal Researcher at the Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research of the Spanish National Research Council (IDAEA-CSIC, Spain).
She obtained her Undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Naples Federico II (Italy), and her PhD in Geotechnical Engineering at the Polytechnical University of Catalonia UPC (Spain) in 2017. As a postdoctoral researcher, she was enrolled in the Subsurface CO₂ group at Imperial College London (ICL, UK) and at the institute Géosciences Rennes of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS, France), where she benefited from a grant funded by the Brittany region.
Her research focuses on quantitative hydrogeology and computational geomechanics, with the aim of contributing to the urgent societal challenge of reducing carbon emissions by generating knowledge and innovative tools that improve the safety of activities related to the production of clean energy, such as high-enthalpy (deep) geothermal resource exploitation and geologic carbon storage. She has contributed to furthering the understanding of the coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) processes occurring when fluids are injected into deep subsurface formations, with special emphasis on unraveling those processes that may trigger injection-induced seismicity.
She has developed mathematical models, modeling tools and innovative approaches for the prediction of rock deformation and stress variation caused by fluid injection/extraction operations, the evaluation of geologic carbon storage capacity in saline reservoirs, and the numerical simulation of heat transport in discrete fracture networks subject to thermo-mechanical deformations.