Dr. S.M. Farouq Ali is Distinguished Professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Houston. He has over 40 years of experience in industry and academia, having served as a professor at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Alberta and the University of Regina. Considered one of the world's leading experts in reservoir engineering, oil recovery and simulation, Farouq Ali advises oil companies and various governments on oil policy and production strategies. He has authored more than 500 papers, conducted more than 200 petroleum reservoir studies and designed over 30 major oil fields projects. Farouq Ali earned his master's and doctoral degrees in petroleum and natural gas engineering from Penn State University.

As a graduate student he conducted pioneering research on micellar-polymer flooding, a process in which a micelle solution is pumped into a reservoir to recover oil. The technique has since become the industry standard for enhanced oil recovery. He is also credited with some of the earliest experimental work on steam flooding, a method of injecting steam to extract heavy crude oil from an oil reservoir. Today steam injection is one of the primary enhanced oil recovery techniques in use. Farouq Ali has been honored with awards from the Society of Petroleum Engineers, the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta and the Russian Academy of Sciences.