Research is: small changes compounding into something transformative.
Some research projects begin with a carefully defined question. Others begin with a problem.
Enter PhD candidate Athena Bahramiyarahmadi, who tells me to take her to one of my favourite restaurants because she is packing up her apartment to move and doesn’t have the mental bandwidth to choose. She’s familiar with teh spot but after I tell her I’ve known the owners for over thirty years and prattle on about the spicy evolution of Edmonton’s “Church Street,” Chinatown, and Little Italy, she says it feels new. We settle into a booth and order far too much food for two people.
Athena finds joy in the little things, embraces different perspectives and new experiences, and loves to tease. Her tenacity, optimism, and humour are impossible to ignore, and her laughter — even when faced with “problems” — is contagious. Alongside devotion to her beloved feline companion (pictured) she has a soft spot for theropods — the agile, bipedal dinosaurs that eventually gave rise to birds — an appreciation rooted less in spectacle than in process: small changes compounding into something transformative.
Athena joined [RG]² to study how rocks respond to stress. Early in her PhD, she set out to mechanically characterize shale from the Duvernay Formation. The shale was so brittle, though, that the core samples crumbled before standard tests could even begin. Instead of forcing the material to fit the method, she changed the method.
That pivot would come to define her research. Within [RG]², she gained access to the mTRIAX machine, the world’s smallest triaxial testing system, designed for samples no bigger than a fingertip. Before committing fully to the lab, she and her supervisors made a deliberate pause. They turned to numerical modelling, using the discrete element method (DEM) to simulate how rocks deform and fail under different conditions. The models helped guide experimental design and revealed what signals mattered most, saving time, resources, and tiny piles of unusable rubble.
Working at that scale required patience and improvisation. Preparing intact specimens took months, and many broke along the way, but eventually the tiny samples yielded something big: a new way to extract meaningful mechanical data from material most labs would discard. Despite the frustrations, her favourite technology remains the mTRIAX. It is temperamental and demanding, she admits, but powerful in the right hands. It rewards patience and attention to detail.
From there, the project grew. Athena was introduced to a prototype high-strain-rate testing system capable of applying impact loads to rock. Unlike traditional slow compression tests, this device captures how rock behaves under rapid loading. Together, the two systems allowed Athena to examine rock behaviour across scales and times — slow and fast, small and conventional.
Athena’s research bridges modelling and experimentation. Working with shale, siltstone, and sandstone from the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin, she tested small and standard specimens under variable loading rates and calibrated numerical models against real data. The aim was not just to understand how rocks fail, but to predict that failure using information that is realistically available in the field.
That distinction matters. At every stage of field development, knowing the mechanical properties of the rock is critical. But obtaining intact core samples is expensive and disruptive. Drill cuttings — fragments produced as a well is drilled — are plentiful and cheap, but usually ignored beyond basic geological description.
What started as broken rock evolved into thinking about data differently: what if those fragments could tell us more? If drill cuttings can be mechanically characterized and interpreted correctly, they offer near-real-time estimates of rock strength and stiffness, improving wellbore stability analysis, reducing risk, and lowering costs — all without stopping the drill bit.
Equally important has been the research environment itself. Athena describes [RG]² as a place where curiosity is encouraged and detours are allowed — where students are trusted to explore rather than rush toward a predetermined outcome. She made a point of looking beyond her immediate field by attending and organizing seminars with the Ualberta Geotechnical Centre that brought together geotechnical engineers, reservoir specialists, and researchers working on everything from permafrost to infrastructure stability. Those conversations reinforced the idea that good science rarely happens in isolation. That culture, she says, made it possible to reshape her project without losing momentum.
We end up chatting for over two hours. By then, the retired owner of the restaurant, who just happened to be in town for the holidays, and his sons who now run the family business have come over to say hello and wish Athena luck as she tackles the final hurdle: writing. Before we head out to admire some of the outdoor lights nearby, they offer us a complimentary limoncello — a fitting finish for an experimental journey that handed her lemons at the starting line.
Looking back from the final stretch, Athena has simple advice for new graduate students: don’t make the degree the goal. Choose your environment carefully. Choose people who support growth. Let yourself change direction when the evidence — or a pile of broken rocks — tells you to.
Athena thanks Dr. Rick Chalaturnyk for his unwavering support and all the students and staff in [RG]2 for fostering a welcoming and collaborative environment. She also wishes to thank Dr. Dion Weatherley for his guidance during the numerical simulation component of her work. Lastly, Athena gratefully acknowledges the collaboration, mentorship, and support of [RG]2’s partners in the NSERC/Energi Simulation Industrial Research Consortium in Reservoir Geomechanics.