Chief Growth Officer
OPX Ai · since July 2025Bringing AI-based integrated operations to Permian producers. She co-authored the 2026 JPT case study on field deployments advancing artificial lift and flow assurance.
Yogashri “Yoshi” Pradhan, MBA, P.E. · Midland, Texas
Technical excellence deserves an audience.
Ten years of reservoir and production engineering in the Permian Basin, a decade of SPE service, and a growing conviction that this industry needs its technical people to be visible. Straight answers for engineers, minus the corporate polish.
Next free webinarThu 8 Oct · 12:00 CT60 minutes · replay included
- Founder, IronLady Energy Advisors
- Chief Growth Officer, OPX Ai
- Adjunct professor, UTA & UTPB
- Author,Fueling Impact
Hart Energy Forty Under 40
- 40Hart Energy Forty Under 40 · 2023
- P.E.Licensed, Texas & New Mexico
- SPEInternational Young Member award · 2018
- UTDistinguished Alumni Rising Star · 2023
- MBAChicago Booth · 2024
Reservoir engineer · author · educatorEx-Chevron · UT Austin · Texas A&M · Chicago Booth
Recognition · 400 ft · topsoil
Where I am now · 1,600 ft · caliche
Four roles, one thesis.
The industry needs its technical people to be visible, inside their companies and outside them. Four wells on one pad, all producing into the same line.
Adjunct Professor
UT Arlington & UT Permian BasinTeaching petroleum engineering to undergraduate and graduate students on a semester basis, plus a Professional Engineer prep course once a year.
Founder
IronLady Energy Advisors · Midland, TexasA consulting practice delivering technical solutions across the energy spectrum: reservoir and production problems, CCUS and regulatory navigation, stakeholder communication.
Author & educator
Fueling Impact · 7 guides · YouTube · PetroPapersAll of it built on one idea from the book: do work worth talking about, learn to frame it, then show up consistently. Field, Frame, Feed.
New · the Career Cohort · 3,000 ft · shot point
Get paid what your experience is worth.
A six-week live programme for oil and gas professionals with five to fifteen years in the field. Market value, positioning, visibility, interviews, negotiation, and a 90-day plan you actually finish. It starts with a free webinar.
- Mon 26 Oct 2026Cohort starts · six Monday evenings, US Central
- 20 seatsFounding cohort, capped deliberately
- $697One payment · $1,497 from cohort two
- 5-day windowApplications open after each webinar, then a 20-minute call
Register in ten seconds
The book · 4,200 ft · sandstone
Fueling Impact
How to Improve Personal Branding in the Oil and Gas Industry. Productivity Press, an imprint of Routledge, published 23 July 2026.
Visibility is not vanity. It is a form of leadership.
Fueling Impact · Pradhan
Paperback $39.99 · Kindle $37.99 · Hardback $186.98
Watch: the launch announcementYoshi on why she wrote it, filmed before publication. On her channel.
“Meritocracy alone in oil and gas doesn’t cut it.” Our industry runs on humility and technical rigor. Those values built something admirable: a culture that is safe, careful, evidence-driven and resilient through cycles that would have broken other sectors. But we taught a generation of engineers that the work speaks for itself, and then watched excellent people get passed over.
What staying invisible costs
Cost 01
The promotion you never knew you were up for
Succession conversations happen in rooms you are not in. If the people in those rooms cannot describe what you do, you are not on the list, whatever your performance review says.
Cost 02
The layoff that finds you first
In a downturn, budget decisions get made fast and coarsely. Being a known quantity outside your immediate team is the cheapest insurance an engineer can buy. Yoshi has been through three.
Cost 03
The good idea that dies in a report
Technical findings that never get translated into a story leadership can act on are, functionally, findings that never happened.
The Field-to-Feed framework
From pumpjacks to podiums. Three stages, in order.
FieldStage 1 · credibility
Work worth talking about: the results, the rigor, the domain depth that earns you the right to an opinion.
- Inventory your quantified wins
- Pick the domain you can own
- Close the gaps before you amplify
FrameStage 2 · translation
Turning a decline curve or a workover result into something a non-technical decision-maker remembers a week later.
- The three-slide story structure
- Specificity earns credibility
- Writing for the room you want
FeedStage 3 · consistency
The channels, from internal presentations and SPE papers to LinkedIn and conferences, at a cadence you can sustain.
- Two channels, not seven
- A rhythm that survives a busy quarter
- Visibility turned into opportunity
Inside the book: ten chapters, three parts122 pages · tap to open
- —Introduction: Why Visibility Matters in Oil and Gas1–4
- Part I · Foundations of personal branding in a technical world
- 01The Industry That Doesn’t Talk About Itself7–13
- 02What Is a Personal Brand, Really?14–27
- 03The Branding Blueprint for Engineers and Operators28–36
- Part II · Building your brand without selling out
- 04Owning Your Story (Even the Setbacks)39–43
- 05Digital Presence for the Reluctant Engineer44–48
- 06Mentorship, Sponsorship, and Strategic Networking49–56
- Part III · Scaling your brand for impact and influence
- 07Branding as a Business Asset59–67
- 08Leading with Empathy and Inclusion68–73
- 09Future-Proofing Your Brand in a Changing Energy Landscape74–79
- 10Brand Legitimacy: A Series of “How To’s…”80–104
- —Conclusion: You Belong at the Table105–108
If any of these sound familiar
- You are technically excellent and quietly frustrated that it hasn’t translated.
- You watched someone less capable get the role because they were better known.
- You find self-promotion genuinely uncomfortable and want a version that isn’t.
- You’re early-career and want to build the habit before you need it.
- You lead a technical team and want them recognised beyond your department.
- You’re moving from operator to consulting, and your network is your pipeline.
Free downloads · no email required · 6,000 ft · shale
Seven guides I wish I’d had.
Real, printable PDFs. The same material Yoshi uses with students and mentees. Take what’s useful, no form in the way.
Guide 01
Future-proof: the skills for the next decade
Ten skills worth building now, from digital fluency and AI literacy to commercial thinking and personal brand.
Open the PDF Guide 02The industry indicators guide
The ten numbers that actually move hiring and budgets: WTI, rig count, frac spreads, DUCs, OPEC+, basin breakevens.
Open the PDF Guide 03The AI-ready engineer
A twelve-month, five-phase roadmap from concept fluency to applied, visible results. No computer science degree required.
Open the PDF Guide 04Where oil & gas fits into the future of energy
Eight realities shaping the next era: demand, gas as a bridge, CCUS, geothermal overlap, capital discipline, the talent gap.
Open the PDF Guide 05The roadmap I would follow starting today
Year by year from scratch: foundations, technical range, tools and data, visibility, then specialise or lead.
Open the PDF Guide 06 · 4 pages50 oil & gas interview questions and answers
Behavioural and fit, drilling and completions, reservoir and petrophysics, production, facilities, HSE, business awareness.
Open the PDF Guide 0712 AI tools every engineer should know
From ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot to Power BI, Seeq, Cognite, Novi Labs, ResFrac and Palantir Foundry. Start with one.
Open the PDFThe guides are the tactics. The cohort is the plan.
Five to fifteen years in and want this applied to your own career, live, with Yoshi? That is the six-week Career Cohort.
See the Career CohortWatch, listen, read · 7,800 ft · limestone
A channel, a podcast, and a decade of writing for SPE.
All of it aimed at the same person: the engineer who wants a straight answer.
YouTube · @yogashripradhan5.1K subscribers · 514 videos · long-form and shorts
Short, specific videos on the things that change an engineering career: how hiring really works, which AI tools earn their keep, what the rig count is telling you, and how to talk about your work without cringing.
PetroPapers
Her own podcast: 65 episodes since 2021, interviewing the authors of technical papers, plus the recurring “Mensan Musings Monday” series.
PetroPapersTechnical papers, leadership and solutions · Apple Podcasts & YouTube
And as a guest
Energy Bytes · Digital WildcattersEP 54, guest-hosting on PetroPapers, Oct 2024
Flipping the Barrel“The Next CEO”, 2020
Published writing · Journal of Petroleum Technology & The Way Ahead
- Aug 2026Quantum computing use cases for the oil and gas industryJPT · SPE R&D Technical Section
- Apr 2026Case study: field deployments of AI-based IOCaaS advancing artificial lift and flow assuranceJPT · with Jai Joon, OPX Ai
- Apr 2025Beyond the rig: a petroleum engineer’s take on growth and change in the industryThe Way Ahead · interview
- Jul 2019Permian operators collaborate to improve understanding of unconventional reservoirsJournal of Petroleum Technology
- 2016–17Six bylines for The Way Ahead: OnePetro, Energy4me, SPE certification, student to professional, emerging leaders, #OperationLateralMobilitySPE · The Way Ahead
Technical papers
- 2022Forecasting well-to-well interference in the Permian Basin with neural networks on pre-run simulationsURTeC-2022-3723394
- 2021Drawdown management strategies — Midland Basin case studiesURTeC-2021-5125 · from her Texas A&M M.S. thesis
- 2018Additional applications of optimal artificial lift strategies in the Permian BasinURTeC-2018-2902293
- 2017Production optimization in the Midland Basin through lateral multiphase flow simulationSPE-187502-MS
- 2015First place, undergraduate division, SPE International Student Paper ContestSPE-178750-STU · ATCE 2015
Work with me · 9,400 ft · dolomite
Advisory, speaking, teaching.
Through IronLady Energy Advisors: technical solutions across the energy spectrum, talks written for an audience that can tell when you’re bluffing, and teaching at two universities.
Advisory & consulting
An ongoing advisory retainer, or a scoped one-off project.
- Production and reservoir engineering problem-solving
- Unconventional asset development review
- Artificial lift and flow assurance strategy
- CCUS and regulatory navigation
- Technical diligence on oil and gas projects
Speaking & keynotes
Conference keynotes, panels and internal company events, drawn from the book and the field.
- Personal branding for technical professionals
- Where AI is genuinely working in oil and gas
- Career resilience through commodity cycles
- Women in energy and the visibility gap
- The realistic future of oil and gas
Teaching & short courses
Semester teaching as an adjunct professor, plus short courses for corporate teams and industry bodies.
- Undergraduate and graduate petroleum engineering
- Half-day and multi-day corporate short courses
- Mastering AI at work, for engineers and regulators
- Graduate-to-professional transition workshops
- Technical writing and communication
PE exam prep
A dedicated Professional Engineer prep course, taught once a year. She is licensed in Texas and New Mexico.
- Annual cohort, limited seats
- Petroleum engineering PE exam focus
- Structured revision plan and practice problems
- Register interest to be told when it opens
Four steps, no runaround
- 1 · Send a noteTimeline, scope and audience.
- 2 · A 30-minute callTo see whether it is a fit.
- 3 · A written scopePrice and dates, in writing.
- 4 · The workDelivered.
About · 10,600 ft · shale
The engineer behind the guides.
“I can make a difference in the world by applying math and science skills.”
That sentence is the reason she has the career she has. She was a teenager at a Women in STEM camp at the University of Houston, in a room full of working petroleum engineers, and it landed. She went to The University of Texas at Austin for petroleum engineering and graduated in 2015, winning the undergraduate division of SPE’s International Student Paper Contest the same year.
What followed was a decade in the field: unconventional asset development and production engineering across the Midland and Delaware Basins, through Statoil, Devon, Endeavor and Coterra, finishing as lead production engineer at Chevron. Decline curves, artificial lift, flow assurance, capital allocation arguments. The unglamorous work that makes wells produce.
In June 2025 she was laid off after a decade in the industry, her third industry layoff, as she told Reuters that November. She founded IronLady Energy Advisors the same month. Twelve months later she is Chief Growth Officer at OPX Ai, an adjunct professor at two universities, and a published author with Routledge. That rebuild is what she now teaches.
- 2015
B.S. Petroleum Engineering, UT Austin
First place, undergraduate division, SPE International Student Paper Contest. President of Women in Petroleum & Geosystems Engineering.
- 2018
Two awards in one year
Houston Engineers Week Young Engineer of the Year, representing SPE’s Gulf Coast Section, and the SPE International Young Member Outstanding Service Award, presented at ATCE in Dallas.
- 2020
M.S. Petroleum Engineering, Texas A&M
Taken while working full time in the basin. Two SPE Southwestern North America regional awards the same year: Reservoir Description and Dynamics, and Service.
- 2021
Chair, SPE Permian Basin Section
A decade of SPE service, from student member to section chair.
- 2023
Hart Energy Forty Under 40
The youngest member of the Class of 2023. UT Austin named her a Distinguished Alumni “Rising Star” the same year.
- 2024
MBA, Chicago Booth
Because at some point every technical decision becomes a financial one. Lead production engineer at Chevron.
- 2026
Fueling Impact published
Routledge, July 2026. Chief Growth Officer at OPX Ai, adjunct professor at UT Arlington and UT Permian Basin, and the Career Cohort launches.
Qualifications
- MBA · 2024University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Business statistics, financial accounting, strategy and Python-based decision modelling.
- M.S. Petroleum Engineering · 2020Texas A&M University
Drawdown management strategies in the Midland Basin.
- Full stack development · 2017The University of Texas Coding Boot Camp
Taken to understand the software the industry keeps buying.
- B.S. Petroleum Engineering · 2015The University of Texas at Austin
Hildebrand Department of Petroleum & Geosystems Engineering.
- LicensureRegistered Professional Engineer, Texas & New Mexico
She teaches the PE prep course once a year.
- AlsoCrossFit Level 1 trainer
Plus the Scaling Certificate. She coaches at Basin CrossFit in Midland.
Contact · 12,500 ft · total depth
Get in touch.
Consulting briefs, speaking invitations, course enquiries, press requests, or a question from a student. The more context you give up front, the faster she can tell you whether she is the right fit.
Start with the guides. Or start with the plan.
Everything she teaches starts in one of two places: the free guides for the tactics, the Career Cohort for a plan you finish.