Urmila Diwekar
Urmila Diwekar
Urmila M Diwekar
Center for Uncertain Systems: Tools for Optimization & Management (CUSTOM)
Vishwamitra Research Institute, Crystal Lake, USA
Biography
Dr. Urmila M. Diwekar is the president and founder of the Vishwamitra Research Institute, a non-profit research organization. From 2002-2004, she was a full Professor in the Departments of Bio, Chemical, and Industrial Engineering and the Institute for Environmental Science and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). She was the first woman full professor in the history of UIC's department of chemical engineering. From 1991-2002 she was on the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), with early promotions to both the Associate and Full Professor levels. In chemical engineering, she has worked extensively in the areas of simulation, design, optimization, control, stochastic modeling, and synthesis of chemical processes. Dr. Diwekar has made major contributions to research on batch distillation including authoring the first book on batch distillation and this work is well recognized. Uncertainties are inherent in real world processes. Recognizing this fact, Dr. Diwekar started working in 1991 on stochastic modeling, efficient methods for uncertainty analysis, and optimization under uncertainty. These led her to productive contributions in fields as diverse as advanced power systems, sustainability, environmental management, nuclear waste disposal, molecular modeling, pollution prevention, and financial option theory. The interdisciplinary nature of the field developed into several research collaborations and in 1999 she founded the Center for Uncertain Systems: Tools for Optimization and Uncertainty (CUSTOM) to foster interactions between various industries, national laboratories and various academic disciplines. Recently, she has completed second edition of her breadth level book on Applied Optimization that is discipline independent. Besides these two text/reference books, she has written number of book chapters and edited a book on tools and methods for pollution prevention, and conducted workshops. Dr. Diwekar is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, and over 150 presentations and seminars. She has chaired numerous conferences and sessions in national and international meetings. She has served as a member of the executive committee, and later as a Director of both the Computers and Systems Analysis (CAST) division and the Environmental division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). She was the programming chair for the newly formed Sustainable Engineering Forum. Besides academic research, she is the author of two commercial software packages (BdistSimOpt, Batch Process Technologies, W. Lafayette, IN, and MultiBatchDS, BPRC Inc., Allison Park, PA), has served as a consultant to more than 20 companies. During the past ten years, Dr. Diwekar has received grant support from the National Science Foundation, the Sandia National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the National Energy Technology Laboratory, the Los Alamos Laboratory, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Technology Alliance, Ford Motor Co., Mallinckrodt Chemicals, and BOC Gases. She is a Fellow of American Institute of Chemical Engineers
Research Interest
Efficient ant colony optimization (EACO), Hamersley sequence sampling (HSS), Metaheuristics, Oracle penalty method
