Andrea Ortiz-Karpf is a Colombian geologist with seven years of industry experience working for BP and Equión-Energía Ltd in Colombia and Canada, and 3 years of academic experience as a PhD student in the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.

With BP Andrea worked as a reservoir and development geologist in the Colombian Foothills, focusing on seismic interpretation, structural modelling, reservoir characterization and reservoir modelling. She then worked in exploration projects onshore in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin, and offshore in the Magdalena Fan in Colombia. She was responsible for progressing exploration projects from regional and sub-regional play identification, chronostratigraphic analysis and paleo-environmental reconstructions, to lead identification, prospect generation and maturation to drillable stage; estimation of resources and risk analysis.

In 2012 Andrea decided to take a new challenge and pursue a PhD in the University of Leeds in northern England where she is investigating deep-water sedimentary systems. She is currently in the third year of her research project which aims to understand the controls of bathymetry on the evolution of submarine channel-levee systems and mass-transport complexes. The project is based on 3D seismic interpretation, seismic stratigraphy and attribute analysis, using 3D seismic volumes from the southern Magdalena Fan, offshore Colombia and the Santos Basin in Brazil.