This grant will provide partial travel support for 30 junior and 8 senior US-based researchers to attend the 2018 Process Systems Engineering (PSE) Conference, that will be held in San Diego, CA, from July 1 to 5, 2018. The primary goal of PSE 2018 is to create an academic and industrial dialogue, a critical assessment of existing enabling technologies, a discussion on research, education, industrial needs, and a forum for new directions, challenges and opportunities in all areas of process systems engineering. The PSE 2018 conference will feature 10 plenary lectures, 22 plenary lectures by world-renowned experts, as well as contributed paper oral and poster sessions. The conference aims at attracting 500 participants from around the world and over 400 contributed papers. A particular emphasis has been placed on increasing the participation of graduate students and postdoctoral associates.
PSE 2018 will bring together and foster interaction among world-renowned experts from academia and industry, researchers and practitioners from government laboratories and several industries, graduate students, and post-doctoral associates. One major outcome of the PSE 2018 Conference will be to identify technology gaps and opportunities for fundamental research. The development of a new generation of engineers that are trained in this field is very important for the chemical process industries. The conference will create a technical and scientific forum for a broad spectrum of topics, including process and product design/synthesis, process dynamics and control, scheduling and planning, supply chain management and logistics; decision making under uncertainty, and education. Cross-cutting themes that will be covered include multi-scale systems engineering, sustainable and renewable systems engineering, modular process intensification, healthcare systems engineering, industrial biotechnology, smart manufacturing,urban/building systems engineering, big data science and engineering,human-machine interface systems engineering, and safety-driven systems engineering. The conference will serve as a vehicle for dissemination of the state of the art in the PSE field through its fully indexed and citable proceedings that will include the plenary and contributed papers, its website, and more importantly through the informal discussions on research, education, training and industrial needs. The chemical, petrochemical, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and services/software industries will benefit by the introduction of new approaches, problems and technologies for discovery through computer-aided product and process design. Such technologies will lead into better products, faster response to the demands and more efficient utilization of the product and processing facilities, which has a direct benefit to the US economy.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
