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Helge K. Dahle

Position

Professor

Affiliation

Department of Mathematics

E-mail: helge.dahle@uib.no
Phone number: +47 55584856; +47 452 49795
Visitor address: Realfagbygget, Allegaten 41, 4 etg. sør
5007 Bergen; Room: 4A13d
Postal address: P.O. Box 7803

NO-5020 Bergen

Norway

Helge K. Dahle

Position

Professor

Affiliation

Department of Mathematics

Research groups

Porous Media Group

Short info

My research is on modelling and simulation of flow and transport in porous media like hydrocarbon reservoirs and saline aquifers. I have led and participated in many projects with goal to understand how supercritical CO2-gas behaves when it is injected in deep geological reservoirs offshore.

Research

My main field of work has been mathematical and numerical modeling of flow and transport in porous media. I have made contributions to upscaling from pore- to continuum scale and further to the field scale with an emphasis on understanding of non-equilibrium effects in constitutive relationships. I have also made contributions to the understanding of Lagrangian type schemes for nonlinear advection dominated transport.

The need to develop practical solutions to the climate crisis has led me to work on CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) with emphasis on geological storage of CO2. A main challenge to this part of my work has been to derive efficient numerical methods to predict the distribution and migration of a CO2-plume under different storage scenarios, to be used in risk-assessment. Important questions are to derive and identify as physically simple models as possible and still capture the main features of the processes. This work has contributed to new methods used in practical analysis of CO2-storage. Recently I have become involved in projects that look at how site-models can be incorporated into regional scale models covering many licenses.

Over the past fifteen years I have been strongly involved in the academic leadership at the University of Bergen. In the period 2005 to 20010 I served as deputy and acting head at the Department of Mathematics. From 2010 to 2013 I was Vice dean of education and then two periods (2013-2021) as dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences (now Faculty of Mathematics and Technology). As Dean of the faculty, I was the chief executive of 7 Departments, more than 800 employees, about 3000 students, with a total budget of more than 1100 MNo). I also participated in the Rector’s leader-group.

Returning to ordinary work as professor, from august 2021, I have worked to introduce Team Based Learning-ideas in the teaching of introductory mathematics courses, and to test out new ways of student assessment. As researcher I am involved with the research in the excellent groups on porous media research at University of Bergen and the independent research institution NORCE.

Teaching

I have long experience as teacher and supervisor at the Department of Mathematics. I have been teaching courses at all levels in mathematics, but with a particular responsibility for introductory level courses. After my period as Dean, I have been teaching Differential Equations (Mat 131) and Functions of Several Variables (Mat 212).

Low student retention is a problem in higher education. The causes of high drop out and low retention may be many. However, research on education and experiences from e.g., the Norwegian centers of excellence in education (SFU) demonstrate that the toolbox to increase retention and reduce unnecessary drop out is big, given that we are willing to use it. The goal should of course be that the students learn more providing them confidence to continue their chosen study programs.

In the past years I have used ideas from Team Based Learning in the teaching of my courses to reduce drop out. This has been done in collaboration with the SERC-centre (Stem Education Resarch Centre) at the faculty. I have also experimented with forms of assessment in these courses. I strongly believe that student assessment is crucial in the learning process, and that putting all effort into a final exam is not the best we can do.

Publications

Conference lecture