Smith Scholarship Recipients
2025 Recipient
Bilal Adaba Ibrahim
Bilal is from Northern Nigeria and is a master’s student in Petroleum Engineering at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he also serves as Vice President of the SPE Student Chapter for student development. His graduate research focuses on fracture representation for surrogate modeling, working at the intersection of scientific machine learning and subsurface analytics.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in Petroleum and Gas Engineering from the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Bilal has built industry experience through internships with SLB and Diversified Well Logging, where he worked on reservoir evaluation, surface logging operations, and data-driven workflows that supported effective field decision-making. He has also presented multiple papers at SPE conferences on data-driven petroleum operations and digital transformation initiatives in upstream engineering.
A recipient of several prestigious honors, including selection to the IRENA Global Youth Forum in Abu Dhabi and the IPTC Education Week in Riyadh, Bilal continues to position himself as a future contributor to global energy development. He is passionate about human development, continuous learning, meeting new people, and fostering high-quality mentorship. He aspires to drive innovative subsurface solutions that strengthen the future of energy systems, with a focus on both industry performance and societal impact.