CAST 2020 Division Awards
For the first time, the CAST Awards Banquet was virtual. It was held on November 24^th, 2020 and was attended by more than 125 members. Dr. Mahmood El-Halwagi gave a great talk as the recipient of the Computing and Chemical Engineering Award.

Other awards that were recognized were:

Dr. Kamil A Khan and Dr. Blake Rawlings: 2020 CAST W. David Smith Jr. Graduate Publication Award
Dr. John D. Siirola: 2020 CAST Computing Practice Award
Dr. Daniel Rivera: 2020 CAST David Himmelblau Award for Innovations in Computer-Based Chemical Engineering Education
Dr. Ruth Misener, 2020 CAST Outstanding Young Researcher Award

The recording of Virtual CAST Awards Banquet is available online: https://youtu.be/2A5nmWJfmNw

CAST 2020 Presentation and Poster Awards

The 2020 CAST Directors’ Student Presentation Award winner is Sungho Shin from Professor Victor Zavala’s group at UW-Madison. His talk was about: “Overlapping Schwarz: A New Decomposition Paradigm for Large-Scale Optimization”.
The 2020 CAST Directors’ Award for outstanding poster winners are: Burcu Beykal from Texas A&M (poster: “Data-driven optimization of integrated planning and scheduling problems under demand uncertainty”, co-authors: S Avraamidou, EN Pistikopoulos) and Kevin Silmore from MIT (poster: “Minimum-Energy Shapes of Open Fluid Membranes with Boundaries”, co-authors: James W. Swan).
The 2020 Undergraduate poster awards for the “Computing and Process Control” Section at the AIChE Annual Student Conference winners are: Stephen Quiton from University of Southern California on "A Matrix Completion Algorithm to Recover Modes Orthogonal to the Minimum Energy Reaction Path" and Maya Desai from Rowan University on "Development of Wastewater Treatment Networks Using the P-Graph Approach".

Read the full article here

CAST-AIChE Young Professionals News

New Leadership: Alexander Dowling (Assistant Professor, Notre Dame) has been selected as the new academic Liaison for the CAST-AIChE Young Professionals community. He joins Onur Onel (ExxonMobil, Industrial Liaison) and together they have lots of exciting ideas and plans for the YP community. Current plans for Summer 2021 include a career-focused virtual event (email with details will follow) and hopefully an in-person social event at the Annual AIChE meeting in Fall 2021.

2020 Annual AIChE Meeting Social: The YP social was also held online on November 17^th, 2020 and attended by more than 40 CAST YPs. The CAST-YP committee (Alexander Dowling, Onur Onel and Fani Boukouvala) organized an event where students got to interact with early career and senior professors, as well as industrial professionals to talk about the the job market and career advice. The group also played a fun abstract-writing game that led to awards for the “funniest” and “most likely to appear in 2021” CAST AIChE Abstracts:

Funniest: "On how to organize a virtual AIChE Annual Meeting using machine learning quantum techniques amid a COVID-19 crisis"
Most Likely to appear in 2021: "Process intensification using quantum computing and machine learning under uncertainty"

For more information about the AIChE-YP community, please visit this link
For more information about CAST and how to become a member, please visit our website.
Join our social media pages: Facebook, Twitter: @AIChECAST10 or linkedin.

Elected Positions

The following 2023 Programming Coordinators have been elected by the CAST community:

Area 10A: Selen Cremaschi
Area 10B: Ali Mesbah
Area 10C: Faruque Hasan
Area 10D: Kamil Khan
Area 10E: Salvador Garcia Muñoz
The full article with the elected coordinators’ biosketches can be found here

The following Executive committee members were also elected for the following positions:

2021 Second Vice Chair: Matt Bassett
2021-2023 Director: Fani Boukouvala
2021-2023 Director: Chrysanthos Gounaris

Highlighting diversity in the CAST community

Black, Latinx/Hispanics, Native American/Indigenous in PSE: Victor Zavala, Martha Grover, and Tunde Ogunnaike started a public-facing "Black, Latinx/Hispanics, Native American/Indigenous in PSE" list.

You can find the list of current members here (this is a non-editable document).
If you would like to sign up on the list or submit the name of a trainee or colleague, use this form.

Process Systems Engineering Webinars

Visit https://apmonitor.com/wiki/index.php/Main/ApplicationWebinars to find many informative webinars on topics including modeling, control, optimization, data-science & machine learning, and more. Recent entries include talks from CAST Award winners. You can also find a link for future speaker nominations.

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