Plenary
Speaker
Biographical Sketch
Professor Venkat Venkatasubramanian
Purdue University, USA
Professor Venkat Venkatasubramanian is Reilly Professor of
Chemical Engineering at Purdue
University. He earned his
Ph. D. in Chemical Engineering (with a Minor in Theoretical Physics) from Cornell University,
M.S. in Physics from Vanderbilt
University, and B. Tech.
in Chemical Engineering from the University of Madras, India. 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. At Purdue, Venkat
directs the research efforts of several graduate students and co-workers in the
Laboratory for Intelligent Process
Systems. Prof. Venkatasubramanian's research contributions have been in the
areas of process fault diagnosis and risk management complex engineered systems,
pharmaceutical informatics, molecular products design, and complex adaptive
systems using knowledge-based systems, neural networks, genetic algorithms,
mathematical programming and statistical approaches. His teaching interests include process
design, process control, pharmaceutical engineering, risk analysis, complex
adaptive systems, artificial intelligence, statistical physics, and applied
statistics.
Prof. Venkatasubramanian has over 190 refereed publications,
and delivered 130+ invited lectures and seminars, including 21 keynote/plenary
lectures, at various international conferences and institutions all over the
world. He has authored a three-volume CACHE case study on Knowledge-based Systems for Heuristic Classification Problems in
Process Engineering. He also co-authored two books, Advanced Knowledge Representation and Handbook of Diffusion and Thermal Properties of Polymers and Polymer
Solutions. Venkat has been the co-editor of two books, Intelligent Systems in Process Engineering and Computer Aided Molecular Design. Venkat has chaired or co-chaired
30+ international meetings, conferences, and sessions in process engineering. Thirty
two doctoral and ten master students have graduated under Venkat's supervision
or co-supervision. Venkat has been a consultant to several major global
corporations and institutions.
Prof. Venkatasubramanian's contributions have been
recognized by several awards and honors. He was the 1990 recipient of the Eminent Overseas Lectureship Award from
the Institution of Engineers in Australia.
In 1993, he was awarded the United
Nations Development Program Invited Lectureship at the Indian Institute of
Technology, Delhi, India. He received, thrice, the Norris Shreve Award for Outstanding
Teaching in Chemical Engineering in 1993, 2004 and 2006, and the Teaching for Tomorrow Award in 2004,
both awarded by Purdue
University. He is a past-President
of the Computer Aids for Chemical Engineering (CACHE) Corporation, a non-profit
organization for the promotion of computers in chemical engineering
education. He served on the editorial
board of the Process Safety Progress
and is currently a Editor of Computers
and Chemical Engineering. In 1996, Industry
week magazine selected him as “one of the fifty R&D stars in the United States whose achievements are shaping the
future of our industrial culture and America's technology policy”.
Venkat’s co-authored paper on risk analysis was awarded
the CAST Directors’ Award for the Best
Poster Presentation at the AIChE Annual meeting in Los Angeles, Nov 2000. 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 process risk identification and management.
In 2006, his co-authored paper on informatics won the Best Paper Prize from Computers
and Chemical Engineering. He is a co-recipient of the Team Research Excellence Award from the College
of Engineering, Purdue University,
twice, in 2007 and 2010, for his contributions to the development of the
discovery informatics framework for molecular products design (2007) and to the
NSF ERC on Pharmaceutical Engineering (2010). Venkat was recognized for his
outstanding teaching record as the only faculty member, in 2007, in the College of Engineering to be elected as a Fellow of the Teaching Academy, a
special honor Purdue bestows for excellence in teaching. In 2009, AIChE honored Venkat with the Computing in Chemical Engineering Award
for his innovative contributions in process systems engineering. In 2011, he received the Research Excellence Award from the College
of Engineering, Purdue University.
Venkat’s other interests include comparative theology, classical music, and
cricket.
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