Saville Lectures

In memory of our colleague, Princeton University’s Department of Chemical Engineering has established the Dudley A. Saville Lectureship for exceptional early-career chemical engineers and scientists. Inspired by his family and colleagues, this series reflects Dudley Saville’s longtime association with Princeton, his uncompromising pursuit of excellence, and his commitment to helping young people begin their academic careers. In his nearly 40 years at Princeton University, he pioneered new directions in fluid mechanics, especially electrohydrodynamics. Although Dudley’s emphasis was always on fundamentals, the practical applications of his research spanned protein crystallization, electrohydrodynamic printing, enhanced oil recovery, patterning of colloidal crystals, and fluid behavior in microgravity, including an experiment flown on the Space Shuttle Columbia.

Dudley was also a pillar supporting the department’s educational mission. Whether teaching thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, engineering mathematics, or transport phenomena, his classes were distinguished by their mathematical rigor and clarity of exposition. A demanding instructor, he earned the respect of generations of chemical engineering students.

In 1997, he received the Alpha Chi Sigma Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers; in 2001, he was named the Stephen C. Macaleer ’63 Professor in Engineering and Applied Science; and in 2003 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional recognition for an American engineer.

2023 Saville Lecturer: Ruth Misener

Dr Ruth Misener (she/her) is a Professor in Computational Optimization in the Imperial College London Department of Computing. Foundations of her research are in numerical optimization algorithms and computational software. Her applications focus on optimization challenges arising in industry, e.g. scheduling in manufacturing or experimental design in chemicals research. Ruth also contributes at the interface between operations research and machine learning. Ruth received an SB from MIT (2007) in chemical engineering. Her PhD (2012), from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton, was supervised by Professor Christodoulos A Floudas.

Ruth is the BASF/RAEng Research Chair in Data-Driven Optimization (2022-27). She received the Macfarlane Medal as the overall winner of the 2017 RAEng Engineers Trust Young Engineer of the Year competition. Her work has been recognized with best paper awards from: The Journal of Global Optimization (2013), International Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems (Best Innovative Demo, 2020), Conference on the Integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, & Operations Research (2021), and Optimization & Engineering (2021). Ruth’s research team develops popular open-source code, for example the Optimization & Machine Learning Toolkit (OMLT >15k PyPI downloads / month) won the 2022 COIN-OR Cup for its contribution to open-source operations research software development.

Automatically designing microreactor experiments

Wed, Feb 15, 2023, 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm

Location: Maeder Hall

Previous Lecturers in the Series

2022	Bryan W. Boudouris	Purdue University
2019	Heather J. Kulik	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2019	Mikhail G. Shapiro	California Institute of Technology
2018	Bradley D. Olsen	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2017	Lea A. Goentoro	California Institute of Technology
2016	Arthi Jayaraman	University of Delaware
2015	M. Scott Shell	University of California, Santa Barbara
2014	Ryan C. Hayward	University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2013	Hang Lu	Georgia Institute of Technology
2012	Todd Squires	University of California, Santa Barbara
2011	Yi Tang	University of California, Los Angeles
2010	Bartosz Grzybowski	Northwestern University
2009	Thomas M. Truskett	University of Texas at Austin