Judy Roper     BS ChE ’79, Missouri University of Science & Technology

Ms. Judy Roper worked over 40 years in exploration and production for ConocoPhillips and ARCO. Over her career, Ms. Roper’s passion has been the challenge of working on “gnarly” problems which require collaboration across disciplines for the best creative, technical, and economic resolution. In retirement, her goal is to use these collaborative, team building, and creative problem-solving skills to mentor, teach and connect students to STEM resources.

From 1979 to 2006, Ms. Roper employed primarily reservoir and production engineering skills in conventional reservoirs, especially with respect to CO2 floods and waterfloods. During that period, her job experience was broadened significantly through serving in operations supervision and joint interest operations (i.e., managing properties operated by others). These broadening experiences provided exposure across the entire Permian Basin, development of strong commercial and negotiating skills, numerous Permian business contacts, and a practical understanding of oil field and gas plant business drivers, contracts, and economics.

From 2006 to retirement on April 1, 2021, Ms. Roper worked with fellow ConocoPhillips pioneering engineers and geoscientists on unconventional reservoirs (aka, shale or ultra-low permeability reservoirs), first in the Barnett Shale. In late 2011, Ms. Roper was part of a small multi-discipline technical group which founded the Unconventional Reservoirs Excellence (URE) team. The URE team collaborated with Asset and Technology Center technologists to learn from failures and to facilitate, develop and promote leading practices needed to economically exploit these very different reservoirs. As ConocoPhillips unconventional portfolio grew to include Bakken, Eagle Ford, Montney and Permian, URE promoted sharing of lessons learned between multi-discipline teams, including workshops where engineers and geoscientists from more mature assets could problem solve with their counterparts in early life assets.

Ms. Roper and her husband, Gary Groves, have 3 beautiful daughters, 2 adorable grandchildren and love retirement in Fort Worth, Texas.