Dr. Deutsch is a Professor in the School of Mining and Petroleum Engineering, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alberta. He teaches and conducts research into better ways to model heterogeneity and uncertainty in mineral deposits and petroleum reservoirs. Before joining the University of Alberta, Dr. Deutsch was an Associate Professor (Research) in the Department of Petroleum Engineering at Stanford University. His employment history also includes three years with Exxon Production Research Company and three years of experience with Placer Dome Inc. Dr. Deutsch has published eight books and over three hundred research papers. Dr. Deutsch holds the Alberta Chamber of Resources Industry Chair in Mining Engineering and the Canada Research Chair in Natural Resources Uncertainty Characterization.

I am a professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alberta and co-director of the Centre for Computational Geostatistics (CCG). My research interests concentrate on geostatistical numerical modeling and uncertainty management with a focus on mining, petroleum, and wildland fire. Numerical modeling is concerned with generating a set of spatial models of variables such as mineral grade, contaminates, flow properties, fire behavior, etc. These models are used to make important engineering decisions in mine design, exploration campaign design, wildland fire management, preplanning, well placement, well management and contaminate cleanup strategies. Uncertainty management focuses on making these engineering decisions in an optimal way that maximizes value, minimizes environmental impact, and minimizes risk. Numerical modeling and uncertainty management are often framed as optimization problems and so I often use machine learning, artificial intelligence, and optimization techniques to improve solutions.

I currently have over 125 publications and I also teach the undergraduate mining engineering capstone course MinE 402: Mine Design Project, MinE 422: Environmental Impact of Mining Activities and a graduate level class MinE 612: Principles of Geostatistics. Further, I am involved in teaching short courses and longer citation courses focused on geostatistical modeling. My other role is as a consultant on geostatistical modeling projects, and I can be reached at jbb@ualberta.ca for additional details.

I welcome email inquiries into my current research, graduate students, or related work. All unsolicited email requests for graduate opportunities are reviewed but due to email volume, a response will be provided if I am interested.

My personal interests include spending time outdoors with my family and Nefertiti (our Border Terrier), curling and paid-on-call firefighting. Because of my interest in firefighting, I have been expanding research into the use of UAVs for spatial mapping for wildland incidents (a.k.a forest fires or wildfires) which has also led to interesting work involving drones for mine rescue applications and law enforcement (drone as a first responder DFR).