Ph.D., California Institute of Technology, 1981
M.S., California Institute of Technology, 1975
B.E., Monash University, Australia, 1971
Honors and Awards
Foremost-McKesson Foundation Fellowship, Caltech
Oscar Weigel Exhibition in Engineering, Monash University
Production Equipment Prize and Solid Mechanics Prize, Monash University
AAAS U.S. EPA Environmental Science Fellowship
National Computer Graphics Prize, 1991
The Niccograph Scientific Visualization Prize, 1991
Computer Graphics Society of Japan Award for Scientific Visualization, 1991
Forefronts of Computational Science Award, 1990
George Tallman Ladd Research Prize, 1985
Presidential Young Investigator Award, National Science Foundation, 1984
Current Technical and Government Committees
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Member of Review Panels)
National Research Council (Two current committees)
National Academy of Sciences (Panel on Destruction of Chemical Warfare Agents)
Member of Advisory Board of the Combustion Research Facility at SANDIA
U.S. DoE Science Advisory Board for Advanced Scientific Computing
Five editorial boards
Current Research
The environment has emerged as one of the critical challenges facing the chemical engineering profession. Research to reduce adverse impacts is being conducted in three areas. The first is a program to enhance our understanding of the physical and chemical processes occurring in the environment. A second area is the development of process design and operating procedures that can incorporate multiple objectives including economic considerations, environment performance, safety, control and product quality. A third theme is the development of chemistries and molecular systems that avoid the occurrence of environmental problems in the first place.
As one illustration of the program, work is currently underway to develop the first regional-scale photochemical air quality model that incorporates scale adaptive solution procedures, aerosol dynamics, and data assimilation. The model will be used to help develop cost effective emissions control strategies.
In the areas of chemical process simulation, design and operation work is proceeding on several fronts. One theme involves the development of very fast process simulation procedures that exploit emerging parallel computing architectures. Particular attention is being given to the direct treatment of uncertainties in the solution and optimization algorithms.
Advances in computational chemistry and the capability to manipulate structures at atomic scales offer the opportunity to design, from first principles, molecules that have the desired physical and chemical properties. Current research is focused on the formulation of combinatorial optimization framework that uses ab initio quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics and direct measurements to evaluate physical properties.
- Development and application of urban, regional and global scale photochemical air pollution models.
- Process design and operation to achieve economic and environmental objectives.
- Combinatorial optimization and process data assimilation.
- Aerosol dynamics and its effects on radiative transfer in the atmosphere.
- Solution, analysis and optimization of nonlinear mathematical models.
- Molecular design and computational chemistry.
- Applications of very high performance computing, high-level language compilers and data visualization.
- Design of cost-effective public policies for environmental problems.
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