2022 CAST Director’s Session Awards

Congratulations to the winners of the 2022 CAST Director’s Session Awards:

Arijit Chakraborty, First place award

• B.S. in Chemical Engineering from BITS Pilani-Goa Campus, India
• Current Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University doing research on applying artificial intelligence (AI) to a wide variety of chemical engineering problems, by leveraging the fundamental knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology, that govern such physicochemical phenomena. He is interested in developing an automated framework for discovering the underlying models for such complex systems, and explaining the same in a natural-language fashion – delving into the field of explainable AI (XAI). He is particularly passionate about utilizing existing knowledge along with AI techniques, in the electrochemical and biological sciences.

Hector Perez, Joint Second place award

• B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Brigham Young University. 
• Current PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University doing research in digital supply chains using Julia with Dow, Inc. Previous industrial experience in advanced process control systems, process design, and software development. Developer of Julia software packages for disjunctive programming and inventory management.

Bridgette Befort, Joint Second place award

• B.S. in Chemical Engineering from University of Kansas. 
• Current PhD candidate at University of Notre Dame doing research on integrated molecular and process design and optimization framework for ionic liquid enabled separation of azeotropic hydrofluorocarbon refrigerant mixtures. Planning to join the explainable AI software firm, Diveplane, after graduation in December 2022