Biography for Laura Starks

     Starks was born in Boston, Massachusetts, grew up in northern Oklahoma, and now lives in Texas. She earned a chemical engineering bachelor's degree, magna cum laude, from Tulane University, in New Orleans, on full scholarship. After a year of engineering at the now-400,000 barrel-per-day Whiting refinery, she completed a finance MBA on partial scholarship at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in five quarters rather than the usual six. While there, she played for a celebrated women's intramural basketball team, the Efficient Mockettes.

     Starks worked full-time for Amoco, ARCO, and predecessors of Valero in engineering, marketing, and finance. She also worked full-time for engineering firm Muse Stancil on projects for national and international energy companies. Through Starks Energy Economics (SEE), she consults on targeted public-company investments and risk management in the energy business.

     One of Starks' responsibilities was designing global crude quality software used in multi-billion-dollar capital budgets. The model accurately predicted crude oil price differentials by year, type, and region, and was applied by twelve departments for projects such as Latin American crude and upgrading investment, tax analysis, licensing export of heavy crude to Asia, and evaluation of all domestic capital expenditures. Other projects in her career included providing recommendations for client bids on crude and product storage terminals totaling $250 MM; implementing a major new strategy of direct sales to gas end-users resulting in $8MM in sales; making traditional gas sales of over $40 MM/year, and presenting the initial plan to form a $400 MM master limited partnership, which later traded on the NYSE.

     Starks has a parallel vocation as a high-stakes thriller author, a venture that shares the same risk assessment background as her energy consulting and which has given her additional marketing and media experience through signings, radio interviews, television interviews, and online social and professional media. Her first book, 13 Days: The Pythagoras Conspiracy, about a plot to sabotage oil refineries, received five-star reviews. The e-book edition is available for all e-readers, including Nook and Kindle. She donates a percentage of 13 Days' revenues to a New Orleans rebuilding fund.

     A Starks short story featuring a risk manager/special forces protagonist was recently accepted and published in the Dreamspell Nightmares anthology, and two of her short stories were accepted and published as Amazon Shorts. Starks has also been published in Mystery Readers Journal, The Dallas Morning News, The Houston Chronicle, the San Antonio Express-News, and Oil and Gas Journal. See Starks' author website at lastarksbooks.com.

     Typically, her interviews and presentations, often for continuing-education credit, focus on oil price factors and/or risk management for organizations such as the Hamon Oil and Gas Center, the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), and the Project Management Institute (PMI), and the Houston Chemical Association.

     She serves as a board member and treasurer of the Friends of the Dallas Public Library, was past board chair of the Dallas Metropolitan YWCA, was selected to attend the inaugural TEDxSMU, co-holds a US patent for lithium alumina, and has run six half-marathons.

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