Profiles of Two JOMAE Associate Editors (The Eighth in a Continuing Series) Free

Since 1987, the ASME Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering (JOMAE), which is published six times a year, has offered a forum and served as an international resource for original peer-reviewed research that advances the state of knowledge on the aspects of analysis, design, and technology development in ocean, offshore, and arctic engineering as well as related fields. The journal is supported by a highly regarded community of experts from industry, academia, and government who make up the ASME's Ocean, Offshore, and Arctic Engineering (OOAE) Division. The journal's primary goal, from its early years and continuing to date, has remained one of showcasing fundamental research and development studies; it has periodically featured review articles and perspectives on well-established and constantly adapted to new topics and trends dealing with the oceans. The OOAE division organizes a conference every year where presentations on new and emerging developments in ocean, offshore, and arctic settings are featured. The 44th International Conference on Ocean, Offshore & Arctic Engineering, often referred to simply as the OMAE conference, is being held in Vancouver, Canada in June 2025; in 2026 and 2027, conferences are planned to be held in Japan and The Netherlands, respectively.

Since June 2019, I have offered editorials such as this one to profile two JOMAE Associate Editors at a time in one of six journal issues offered each year. The present editorial represents the eighth in this series; the most recent one appeared in the Aug. 2024 issue [1]. Similar editorials profiling JOMAE Associate Editors appeared in June 2019, Aug. 2020, Oct. 2021, Apr. 2022, Apr. 2023, Oct. 2023, and Aug. 2024 issues. I am honored and proud to have been able to share with you—the journal's reader—brief profiles of many of the Associate Editors for this journal, whom I have had the fortune to invite to be part of our team and to work with while we offer quality content to our readers. These editorials give me an opportunity to share with you a little about the technical and other accomplishments of these experts, while sometimes highlighting snippets of their work and their professional achievements and goals, even if only briefly.

The journal's 33 Associate Editors are experts in specialty areas that include offshore technology, structures, safety, and reliability, materials technology, ocean engineering, ocean renewable energy, pipelines, risers, and subsea systems, computational fluid dynamics and vortex-induced vibration, offshore geotechnics, arctic engineering, and ocean space utilization. They come from 15 countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

I began as Editor-in-Chief of this journal in 2018. It has been a pleasure to profile two Associate Editors at a time in this ongoing series of editorials. In addition to the two profiled in the present issue, I encourage you to learn about the most recently profiled Associate Editors [1] as well as others profiled going back to June 2019. All of these profiles can be readily found in back issues of the journal. In the current issue, I am pleased to present to you two Associate Editors: (1) Dr. Erik Vanem, Research Scientist at DNV and Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Oslo, Norway; and (2) Dr. Rajeev K. Jaiman, Professor and NSERC/Seaspan Industrial Research Chair in Intelligent and Green Marine Vessels (IGMVs) at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada.

Associate Editor, Dr. Erik Vanem

Dr. Erik Vanem (Fig. 1) is currently working as a metocean specialist for DNV Energy Systems at DNVs headquarters in Høvik, Norway. Prior to moving to DNV Energy in 2025, he spent more than 20 years as a Research Scientist at DNVs research department, where he focused on aspects related to maritime transport. Most recently, he was part of the group for data-driven services in the maritime transport program of DNV Research and Development. In addition, he served as an Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Oslo, Norway in a 20% position over an 8-year period from 2016 to 2024.

Dr. Vanem studied at the University of Oslo, Norway, where he first enrolled in 1991. In 1996, he graduated with the degree of Cand. Scient (candidatus scientiarum; equivalent to the Master of Science degree) in theoretical physics and quantum field theory (the title of his thesis was Two-photon Decay of the B-meson in a Bound State Model; this work considered rare quark processes within the standard model of particle physics). After finishing his thesis, Dr. Vanem spent one semester as a lecturer of physics at Oslo University College, Faculty of Engineering and served 1 year as a research assistant at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment's Department for Systems Analysis as part of his military service. Later, he spent 2 years as an onboard marine geophysicist with Petroleum Geo-Services Reservoir and close to 3 years as a research scientist focused on mobile telecommunications at Telenor R&D before joining DNV Research and Development in 2003. From 2009 to 2012, Dr. Vanem worked on his doctoral thesis in statistics at the Department of Mathematics, University of Oslo, Norway. Specifically, he worked on spatio-temporal statistical models for significant wave height with a climate-change perspective and obtained his Ph.D. degree from the same university in 2012. His thesis was later published, in a slightly revised form, as a monograph by Springer. After completing his Ph.D. studies, Dr. Vanem continued as a research scientist and project manager at DNV and, since 2016, he also has an appointment as Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of Oslo, Norway. Dr. Vanem has been involved in the supervision of several Bachelor's and Master's degree students at the University of Oslo and has successfully co-supervised two Ph.D. students to completion also at the University of Oslo, Norway. Currently, he is co-supervising three doctoral candidates at the University of Oslo, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway and at Mondragon University, Spain.

Over his career, Dr. Vanem has worked on a wide range of topics and, as a researcher at DNV, he has been involved in research projects related to maritime safety, risk, and reliability assessments, the ocean environment, and data analytics. With a background in statistics, he has a particular interest in probabilistic models for metocean variables, including extreme value analysis, non-stationary modeling, and multivariate distributions. In particular, Dr. Vanem has worked on environmental contours that describe multivariate extreme metocean conditions for use in the structural reliability assessment and in the probabilistic design of marine structures (Fig. 2). Recently, he has been involved in research related to data-driven condition monitoring and prognostics and health management for different maritime systems and components, including maritime battery systems.

To date, Dr. Vanem has authored or co-authored more than 80 scientific journal papers and more than 100 peer-reviewed conference papers as well as two book chapters and a monograph. Several of his papers have received best paper awards at different conferences and journals. In addition, he prepared a number of submissions for the International Maritime Organization and contributed to two patent applications. He has also secured public funding for several research projects from both the Norwegian Research Council and the European Union. He is currently in his second term as a member of the ISSC Sub-Committee I.1: Environment (2018–2022; 2022–2025). Dr. Vanem has been a scientific/technical committee member for various international conferences, a member of the evaluation committees, and/or as opponent at four Ph.D. defenses at NTNU and at the University of Tromsø, and he has served as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation, USA. He has served as a paper reviewer for numerous international journals and conferences and has been a member of the editorial board for Ocean Engineering since 2016. Since 2019, he has been an Associate Editor for the ASME JOMAE, and he recently served as Guest Editor for a special issue (published in June 2025) on maritime transport in the same journal.

Associate Editor, Dr. Rajeev K. Jaiman

Dr. Rajeev K. Jaiman (Fig. 3) is a Full Professor and the NSERC/Seaspan Industrial Chair in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the UBC, Vancouver, Canada. He has over 25 years of experience in computational engineering and high-performance computing and his lab is currently focusing on the integration of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled data-driven models with traditional mechanics and multiphysics simulations for reducing ship noise and greenhouse gas emissions. Prior to his current appointment at the UBC, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he worked on deepwater technologies at the Keppel-NUS Corporate Lab.

Dr. Jaiman has been awarded the ASEAN Outstanding Engineering Achievement Award and was noted for Prestigious Engineering Recognition by The Institute of Engineers, Singapore for the development of a next-generation revolutionary semi-submersible for ultra-deep water. Prior to joining NUS, he was Director of computational fluid dynamics Development at Altair Engineering and worked as a lead software developer for over 5 years at ACUSIM, California. Besides the development and application of numerical techniques, his tools are used to explore a wide range of fundamental physics questions arising from both canonical as well as practical problems of fluid mechanics and fluid–structure interactions.

Dr. Jaiman has authored or co-authored over 140 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings and he has published two books on the fluid–structure interaction. Dr. Jaiman earned his first degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. He received his Master's and Doctorate degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a Fellow of SNAME and an Associate Editor of JOMAE.

In the maritime and offshore energy sectors, the integration of AI and digitalization is revolutionizing traditional practice. Historically, design and operational efficiency have been the primary drivers of digital transformation in these industries, dictated by risk and cost considerations. However, this landscape is dramatically changing due to the emergent green energy transition and related sustainability requirements that are accelerating the adoption of AI-enabled technologies throughout the marine and offshore community. Partnering with the Canadian marine industry, Dr. Jaiman's lab at the UBC has been addressing scientific challenges and providing technical solutions toward the development of next-generation IGMVs (see Fig. 4). New scientific understanding and tools are helping to protect marine ecosystems, while supporting the goals of Canada's National Oceans Protection Plan. Related research collaboration with industry partners is advancing their competitiveness under the Canadian National Shipbuilding Strategy. Technical objectives of Dr. Jaiman's research program include the development of high-fidelity methodologies and tools for multiphysics simulations that can predict fundamental characteristics and lead to improved design, production, and operation of marine vessels. His research program is helping to develop both physics-based and data-driven models to support a green energy transition and sustainability requirements of existing and new marine systems.

Marine vessels interact with ocean environments in complex ways. A fully coupled analysis is required to capture the dynamic response of the marine vessel. Accurate and efficient prediction of marine environments necessitates a simulation framework that integrates multiphase fluid–structure interaction with the modeling of acoustics generation and propagation. While Dr. Jaiman's in-house multiphase and multiphysics computational framework is making it possible to address such complex nonlinear dynamics using first principles, solving these high-fidelity model-based problems remains computationally intractable for multi-query and time-critical applications such as in design optimization and real-time control. Figure 4 offers an overarching schematic for a full-scale model drillship and marine thruster with complex flow patterns, along with the processes for model reduction and data-driven modeling. A novel physics-based machine learning framework for predicting multiphysics and acoustic physics is being utilized for the development of control technologies and the optimization of marine vessels and propellers.