Congratulations to Fani Boukouvala, Martha Grover, Andrew Medford, Carson Meredith and David Sholl for receiving the 2024 David Himmelblau Award for Innovations in Computer-Based Chemical Engineering Education, for developing the highly innovative online Certificate for Data-Science for the Chemical Sciences at Georgia Tech!
Fani Boukouvala is an Associate Professor in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. She obtained her BS from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, her PhD from Rutgers University NJ and held postdoctoral positions at Princeton and Texas A&M Universities. Her research focuses on merging data-analytics, mathematical programming and chemical engineering to optimize complex systems in the areas of carbon capture, power grid operations, plastics recycling and bioprocessing. She has received several awards, including three best paper awards, the NSF Career Award, the IChEME Junior Sargent Medal and the AICHE CAST Outstanding Young Investigator Award. Dr. Boukouvala’s elective course on data-driven systems engineering, is a flagship course of a new graduate certificate that received the GT Curriculum Innovation Award. She has served as the Area Chair and Director of the CAST division, and holds an editorial position in the Journal of Computers & Chemical Engineering.
Martha Grover is a Professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, and Associate Chair for Graduate Studies. She is the ADVANCE Professor for the College of Engineering and has a joint appointment at Savannah River National Laboratory. Martha was the chair of the CAST Division in 2022. Her research program is dedicated to understanding, modeling, and engineering the self-assembly of atoms and small molecules to create larger scale structures and complex functionality. Her approach draws on process systems engineering, combining modeling and experiments in applications dominated by kinetics, including film deposition, crystal growth, and origins of life chemistry.
AJ Medford is an Associate Professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. He attended North Carolina State University as an undergraduate, and subsequently spent a year as a Fulbright fellow at the Technical University of Denmark before attending Stanford University where he received his Ph.D in Chemical Engineering. His research focuses on the intersection of data science, electronic structure theory, and catalysis science, with contributions including machine-learned exchange correlation functionals for density functional theory, application of neural networks to fit transient kinetic datasets, and establishing mechanistic insight into nitrogen conversion reactions, and was the recipient of the 2023 ACS "Early Career in Catalysis" award. He developed the course "Data Analytics for Chemical Engineers", which is now one of the core courses in the "Data Science for the Chemical Industry" certificate program and has won several teaching awards including the Georgia Tech "Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence" and "Excellence in Online Teaching" awards. Outside of research and teaching, he enjoys spending time with his wife and two daughters, international travel, and outdoor activities.
Carson Meredith is a professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) at Georgia Tech. He received a BS degree in Chemical Engineering from Georgia Tech (1993) and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin (1998). He was a postdoc at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 1998 to 2000 and joined the ChBE faculty at Georgia Tech in 2000. He is an AIChE Fellow and is the Executive Director of Georgia Tech’s Renewable Bioproducts Institute, one of ten interdisciplinary research institutes on the campus.
Dr. David Sholl is the Executive Director and Vice Provost of the University of Tennessee Oak Ridge Innovation Institute (UT-ORII), Director of the Transformational Decarbonization Initiative at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Editor-in-Chief of AIChE Journal. From 2022-2023 he was a Strategic Policy Advisor for DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. From 2013-2021 David was the School Chair of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. He has published over 400 papers and several books. David was on the Board of Directors of AIChE from 2019-2021 and in 2020 chaired the inaugural Gordon Research Conference on Chemical Separations. In 2024 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
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