Richard Lakerveld is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He joined the CBE department of HKUST in October 2014. He was an Assistant Professor at Delft University of Technology for two years before joining the faculty of HKUST. Prior to that, he worked for two years as postdoctoral associate at the Chemical Engineering Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the group of Paul Barton. At MIT, he worked on plant-wide control of continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing and on optimal control of directed self-assembly. He received his chemical engineering education from Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. He obtained both his MSc and PhD degree cum laude and completed an honors track. His PhD research involved the development of a task-based design approach for solution crystallization processes under supervision of Johan Grievink, Peter Jansens, and Herman Kramer. He was the recipient of an NWO Veni Award in 2013, which is an early career award from the Dutch Science Foundation. His other personal awards and grants include the Novartis-MIT Enabling Control System Award and four consecutive GRF Awards from Hong Kong's Science Foundation, which are competitive personal grants aimed at supporting cutting-edge research. He also received the School of Engineering Teaching Excellence Appreciation Award and is a member of the 2019 Class of Influential Researchers of the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.
His research interests are in the field of Process Systems Engineering with a focus on the design and advanced manufacture of crystalline and self-assembled materials. The scope of his current research includes continuous pharmaceutical manufacturing, intensified crystallization processes, 3D printing, optimization and control of directed self-assembly, and integrated solvent and process design. His research is both experimental as well as computational. He has published 38 journal papers of which 27 as first or corresponding author in journals such as AIChE Journal, Crystal Growth & Design, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, Organic Process Research & Development, Lab on a Chip, Angewandte Chemie, Chemical Engineering Journal, etc., which have received over 900 citations to date. He was a guest editor for Computers & Chemical Engineering and Process Integration & Optimization for Sustainability and was an associate editor of the 2015 American Control Conference. Furthermore, he is member of various scientific committees of international conferences such as the 2021 IFAC Symposium on Advanced Control of Chemical Processes, the 2019 European Symposium on Computer Aided Process Engineering (ESCAPE-29), and the 2017 Asian Pacific Conference on Chemical Engineering. He is a senior member of the AIChE and was a member of the organizing committee of the ESCAPE-29. He has supervised three graduated PhD students and four graduated MPhil students and is currently supervising nine graduate students in his research group. When time permits, he likes to take his bike for a road trip or spend some time on the football pitch