Krittanon "Pond" Sirorattanakul
Welcome to my homepage!
My name is Krittanon Sirorattanakul, but you can call me "Pond". I recently joined Chevron as a full-time Subsurface Specialty Engineer (Geomechanics Specialist) at the Chevron Technical Center in Houston, Texas, starting on August 1, 2024, to support industrial research on induced seismicity related to wastewater disposal and carbon storage (CCS).
Before that, I earned a Ph.D. in Geophysics from the Seismological Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (Caltech). There, I worked under the supervision of Prof. Jean-Philippe Avouac and Prof. Ares J. Rosakis. I am particularly interested in deciphering the secrets of nature by harnessing information hidden in noisy observations. My research focuses on the response of faults to transient stresses and fluids, both in natural settings and from controlled laboratory experiments, which is one of the research themes in the Center for Geomechanics and Mitigation of Geohazards (GMG). Little is known about the factors that determine whether transient stresses and fluids will drive the faults to slip slowly as aseismic creep or rapidly as earthquakes. Learn more about my research here.
My undergraduate studies before Caltech were at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. In 2018, I received a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in Physics and a Bachelor of Art (B.A.) in Earth and Environmental Sciences. Since my interests lie in the data-driven aspect of sciences rather than a particular discipline, I have explored different fields of study by joining three different research groups, including Joshua Peper's Astrophysics group, Daniel Ou-Yang's Soft-matter Physics group, and Anne Meltzer's Seismology group.
I have participated in four different internships. The first internship (summer 2016) was at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a governmental facility in Batavia, Illinois, where I joined as a part of the Lee Teng Undergraduate Internship in Accelerator Science and Engineering program. The second internship (summer 2017) was at Nurture Nature Center, a non-profit organization in Easton, Pennsylvania, where I contributed to developing the "6 Degrees of Connection" education program. The third (summer 2022) and fourth internships (summer 2023) were at the Geomechanics Chapter of Chevron Technical Center in Houston, Texas, where I applied the computational tools that I developed during my PhD research to forecast injection-induced seismicity and make recommendations to field operators on hazard mitigation.
To learn more about me, feel free to check out my resume or my Curriculum Vitae:
While I have moved to the industry, I am still committed to continuing to participate in academics, including publishing my research, providing peer reviews to manuscripts, and attending conferences. For peer-reviewer or seminar invitations, please contact me at krittanon.pond@gmail.com.