June 17, 2015

Associate Professor Professor Carl Laird was recently named a recipient of the 2015 AIChE Computing & Systems Technology Division (CAST) Outstanding Young Researcher Award.

Established in 2004, this award recognizes an individual under the age of 40 for outstanding contributions to chemical engineering computing and systems technology literature.  The award will be presented at the AIChE annual meeting this Fall, and includes a plaque and check for $3,000.

Professor Laird joined Purdue in 2014. Prior to coming to Purdue, he was an faculty member at Texas A&M University. He completed his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in 2006 and went on to complete post-doctoral work in the Department of Epidemiology in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh in 2007.

His research interests include Large-scale Non-linear Optimization of Chemical Process Systems, Networks and Public Health, and Parallel Scientific Computing.

Professor Laird has received several research and teaching awards, including the prestigious Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software and the IBM Bravo Award for his work on IPOPT, a software library for solving nonlinear, non-convex, large-scale continuous optimization problems. He is also a recipient of the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award and the Montague Center for Teaching Excellence Award.