Announcing the 2018 Processes Travel Award for Post-Doctoral Fellows and Ph.D. Students

With the goal of promoting the development of early career investigators in the fields of chemical process and biological systems engineering, Processes welcomed applications for the 2018 Processes Travel Award for post-doctoral fellows and Ph.D. students. We received 72 applications for the award, and the overall quality of the applications was outstanding. On behalf of the Editors of Processes, I am pleased to announce the winner of the inaugural Processes Travel Award for 2018.

The Processes Travel Award has been granted to Mr. Dhruv Gupta, a Ph.D. candidate in Christos Maravelias’ laboratory at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He will receive 800 CHF to help support travel to present his research at the Process Systems Engineering conference (PSE 2018) in San Diego, CA, USA. His presentation is entitled “General Mixed-Integer Programming State-Space Model for Online Scheduling.”

Mr. Gupta obtained his B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering at IIT-Bombay, graduating among the top students in his class. He joined Christos Maravelias’ research group in November 2013 and is working towards the development of optimization methods for online chemical production (re)scheduling. He has streamlined the terminology for the new field of online scheduling, proposed a general framework for online scheduling, and showed how past methods/approaches for rescheduling fit into the novel generalized framework he has proposed. He has invented a new state-space model for online scheduling, thus alleviating many of the challenges which were earlier preventing the application of scheduling in commercial areas such as bio-manufacturing. On a fundamental level, his investigation has led to the understanding of how the design of the scheduling problem solved online (the open-loop problem), and the frequency at which it is solved, affects the quality of the actual implemented schedule (the closed-loop schedule). His ultimate goal is to find the best “online scheduling algorithm.” He already has three very high-quality first author publications to his credit and is preparing more manuscripts.

The Editor, Managing Editors, and Editorial Board Members congratulate Mr. Dhruv Gupta on winning the 2018 Processes Travel Award and we are grateful to MDPI for their generous support of the award this year and in the future.