2024 Mellichamp Lecture: Ruth Misener
The Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Lectureship was established in 2013 to recognize the work of a distinguished young researcher in any area related to the field of chemical engineering. The recipient is selected by the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering faculty in recognition of his or her contributions to research and education. Ruth Misener is the 2024 Mellichamp Lecturer.
Ruth Misener is Professor of Computational Optimisation at Imperial College where she holds a BASF / Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) Research Chair in Data-Driven Optimisation. In 2017, she received the MacFarlane Medal as overall winner of the RAEng Young Engineer Trust Engineer of the Year competition. Misener also received the 2023 Roger Needham Award from the British Computing Society. Her best paper awards are from the: Journal of Global Optimization (2013), International Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2020, Best Innovative Demo), Conference on the Integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, & Operations Research (CPAIOR 2021), Optimization & Engineering (2021), and Computers & Chemical Engineering (2023). She has given named lectures at Princeton University (2023 Saville Lecture) and Georgia Institute of Technology (2018 Mellichamp Lecture). Misener leads a team of research engineers in developing the Optimization & Machine Learning Toolkit (OMLT), which won the 2022 COIN-OR Cup as the best contribution to open-source operations research software development. She is associate editor for INFORMS Journal on Computing and Operations Research and is also a NeurIPS Area Chair.