Computers & Chemical Engineering: Best papers of 2006 Editorial Note The Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal has assessed the papers published in Volume 30 by means of a three stage process consisting of nomination, first round elimination and final round balloting. This year, the process resulted in two papers that ranked very closely. Thus, the joint winners of the Best Paper Award for 2006 are the paper by Doyle et al and the paper by Venkatasubramanian et al. The Doyle paper, entitled Circadian Rhythm: a natural and robust, multiscale control system, uses advanced control principles to analyze, explain and modify the behavior of biological systems. The paper is cited for providing an excellent analysis of the multiscale aspects of this important fundamental natural phenomena from a control systems perspective. The work is seen as having potential for applications in other areas of process dynamics and control. The Venkatasubramanian paper, Ontological informatics infrastructure for pharmaceutical product development and manufacturing, is described as an original and ambitious work that proposes a novel theoretical and practical development for supporting the knowledge and information associated with product lifecycle management, with special focus in the pharmaceutical industry. The proposed framework for data analysis and manipulation for decision making was viewed to be very comprehensive and generalizable to other industry sectors and thus of potentially big impact. The readers of the Journal are reminded that signed nominations are accepted from the readership for the first round of the process of selecting the Best Paper of each year. Nominations should be sent to the editors or any member of the Editorial Advisory Board by May of the year following the year in which the paper appeared. About the Authors: Venkat Venkatasubramanian: Venkat Venkatasubramanian is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and a Professor of Industrial and Physical Pharmacy (by courtesy) at Purdue University. He earned his Ph. D. in Chemical Engineering (with a Minor in Theoretical Physics) from Cornell University in 1984, M.S. in Theoretical Physics from Vanderbilt University in 1979, and B. Tech. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Madras, India, in 1977. Venkat worked as a Research Associate in Artificial Intelligence in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and taught at Columbia University before joining Purdue in 1988. Prof. Venkatasubramanian's
research contributions have been in the areas of process fault diagnosis and abnormal events management, risk analysis and management in complex engineered systems, informatics in pharmaceutical engineering, molecular products engineering, and complex adaptive systems, artificial intelligence and statistical mechanics. Prof. Venkatasubramanian has published over 175 refereed papers, and delivered over 130 invited lectures and seminars, including 20 keynote/plenary lectures, at various international conferences and institutions. He has co authored/co edited five books. He leads the informatics and cyberinfrastructure research efforts in pharmaceutical engineering at Purdue and the Integrated Systems Science Thrust in the NSF ERC on Structured Organic Particulate Systems. Venkat and his students were awarded the Best Paper Prize for 2002 05 from the Journal of Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, sponsored by the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), for a paper on abnormal events management. He is a co recipient of the Team Research Excellence Award from the College of Engineering, Purdue University, in 2007 for his contributions to the development of the Discovery Informatics framework for molecular products design. In 2009, AIChE honored Venkat with the Computing in Chemical Engineering Award for his innovative contributions in process systems engineering. Venkat is dedicated to teaching, and has received the Norris Shreve Award for Outstanding Teaching in Chemical Engineering in 1993, 2004 and 2006, Teaching for Tomorrow Award in 2004, elected Fellow of the Teaching Academy in 2007, all awarded by Purdue University. He serves on the Editorial Board of Computers and Chemical Engineering as the Associate Editor for Cyberinfrastructure and Informatics area. Venkat s other interests include comparative theology, classical music, and cricket. Chunhua Zhao: Dr. Chunhua Zhao has been working in the area of pharmaceutical/chemical engineering, process development and manufacturing for more than ten years. He also has more than ten years experience in information technology and applications in pharmaceutical/chemical industry. Dr. Zhao graduated with honors with Bachelor of Engineering Degree in Chemical Engineering minor in Control and Computer Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing in 1995. He received Master of Philosophy Degree in Chemical Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China, in August 1998. He received his Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette IN, in 2002. Since 2006, he has been with Bayer Technology Services (Shanghai) as Head of Healthcare process. Girish Joglekar: Dr. G S Joglekar is a Senior Research Scientist at Purdue University. He received B.Tech and M.Tech. (Chem. Eng.) from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India, in 1974 and 1976, respectively. He received M.S. (Comp. Sc.) and Ph.D. (Chem. Eng.) from Syracuse University in 1981. In 1981, he joined the School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University, USA as a Post Doctoral Research Fellow. He co founded Batch Process Technologies, Inc., in 1984. Since 1981, he has been involved in the
development of hybrid simulators for batch processes and batch distillation. In 2005 he returned to Purdue University as a Senior Research Scientist and has worked in the areas of information and knowledge modeling with emphasis on pharmaceutical processes. Ankur Jain: Dr. Ankur Jain is a senior analyst at enterprise Optimization division of United Airlines in Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering & M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University in 2007, and B. Tech. in Chemical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, India in 2002. His research interests include applications of optimization & statistics, and information & knowledge modeling especially in the area of decision making. His Ph.D. dissertation involved developing an ontological framework for knowledge modeling and decision support for pharmaceutical product development. His current work at United Airlines involves optimization and statistical modeling to develop decision support tools for airlines operations and business. Leaelaf Hailemariam: Dr. Leaelaf Mengistu Hailemariam earned in Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from Addis Ababa University in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 2000. He worked for the Chemical Engineering Department of Addis Ababa University as an assistant lecturer before joining Purdue University in 2002, where he earned a Masters Degree in Chemical Engineering in 2004 for his work on bubble growth in viscoelastic fluids. He also earned a Masters Degree in Industrial Engineering in 2007 as well as a PhD in Chemical Engineering for work on pharmaceutical informatics in 2008 from Purdue. He worked as an intern for Shell Global Solutions in process development (2006) and for Eli Lilly and Company in pharmaceutical informatics (2007). He is currently working for the Dow Chemical Company in Midland, MI. Pradeep Suresh: Pradeep Suresh is a graduate student working towards his Ph.D. in the School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University. He received his Bachelors of Technology from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras in 2004 and hopes to receive his Ph.D. by December 2008. His dissertation topic centers on exploring ontologies for mechanistic mathematical knowledge modeling in pharmaceutical product development and its application towards process control, optimization and monitoring. He worked as a graduate summer intern with the Process Dynamics and Optimization group at DuPont, Wilmington DE in 2007 where he worked on Model predictive Control strategies for DuPont
chemical processes. Pradeep plans to join the Dow Chemical Company upon graduation. Pavan Akkisetty: Pavankumar Akkisetty is a Ph. D. candidate in Chemical Engineering at Purdue University. He received his Bachelor of Technology from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras in 2004. His doctoral dissertation work involves an ontological informatics framework for pharmaceutical product development using milling as a case study. Pavan worked with Eli Lilly as a summer intern in 2007. His research interests are process systems, machine learning, statistics, optimization, and information technology. Kenneth R. Morris : Dr. Kenneth R. Morris received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1987 and joined E.R. Squibb and Sons in the Preformulation group. There he developed the Physical Characterization group and co developed the company s Materials Science function. He went on to form the Preformulation/Physical Pharmacy group in the Bristol Myers Products organization, which he led along with Analytical Chemistry. During his time at BMS he also served as a teaching and advising adjunct professor at Rutgers College of Pharmacy and St. Johns University. Dr. Morris moved to the department of Industrial and Physical Pharmacy at Purdue University in the fall of 1997 where he was a professor and associate head. In 2008, he moved to the University of Hawaii at Hilo as a Professor of Pharmaceutics. His research and publishing interests include: developing analytical tools for solid state characterization; the study of the impact of processing on the physical characteristics of formulation components and on subsequent dosage form performance; pharmaceutical unit operation optimization; advanced applications of powder x ray diffraction and dielectric analysis; the study of the association of water with pharmaceutical solids; and modeling and methods for monitoring processing unit operations. Dr. Morris has over 100 publications in both the pharmaceutical and environmental fields. He was the Purdue Univeristy CAMP (consortium for the advanced manufacturing of pharmaceuticals) technical director and the outgoing associate director of the NSF IUCRC CPPR (center for pharmaceutical processing research). Professor Morris served on the FDA PAT subcommittee and continues as a special government employee chairing the FDA OPS scientific advisory committee and sitting on the manufacturing sub committee to advise the agency in his areas of expertise.
G. V. Reklaitis: G.V. Rex Reklaitis is Edward W. Comings Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University, has served as Head of the School of Chemical Engineering as well as Assistant Dean of Engineering for Graduate Education and Research. He currently is deputy director of the NSF Engineering Research Center on Structured Organic Particulate Systems. He earned the BS from the Illinois Institute of Technology, as well as MS and PhD from Stanford University, all in chemical engineering. His expertise lies in process systems engineering, the application of information and computing technologies to process and product design, process operations and enterprise wide decision support. Through the ERC he is involved in model based approaches to improving the design, development and manufacturing of pharmaceutical products. Additional current research interests includes enterprise wide decision support systems for product portfolio and supply chain management as well as the development of energy systems models for policy studies. Reklaitis is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, fellow of AIChE, Trustee of CACHE, past Editor in Chief and current Editorial Advisory Board member of Computers & Chemical Engineering as well as member of editorial boards for the Journal of Pharmaceutical Innovation and Computer Applications in Engineering Education. He has served on the AICHE Board of Directors and the Governing Board of the Council for Chemical Research. He is recipient of the AICHE Computing in Chemical Engineering Award.