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.
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 |