Dr. Mario Eden is the Department Chair and Joe T. & Billie Carole McMillan Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Auburn University. Dr. Eden is also the Director of an NSF-IGERT Program on Integrated Biorefining. His main areas of expertise include process design, integration and optimization, as well as molecular synthesis and product design. His group focuses on the development of systematic methodologies for process and product synthesis, design, integration, and optimization.

Dr. Eden''s research has generated 90 refereed papers/book chapters and resulted in over 275 presentations at national and international meetings, including invited keynote lectures at the 2006 Danish Chemical Engineering Conference, the 2006 and 2012 AIChE Annual Meetings, the 2009 Process Systems Engineering Conference, the 2010 Mississippi State University Biofuels Conference, the 2013 International Symposium on Sustainable Chemical Product and Process Engineering, the 2013 World Congress of Chemical Engineering, and the 24th European Symposium on Computer Aided Chemical Engineering. To support his research and educational activities, Dr. Eden has successfully secured over $6.6M in extramural funding as PI, and an additional $10.6M as co-PI from federal and corporate sponsors.

Dr. Eden is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2006), the Auburn Engineering Alumni Council Junior Faculty Research Award (2006), the William F. Walker Superior Teaching Award (2007), the Fred H. Pumphrey Teaching Award for Excellence (2009 and 2011), the SGA Award for Outstanding Faculty Member in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering (2009 and 2011), the Outstanding Faculty Member in the Department of Chemical Engineering (2009, 2011, 2013, and 2014), the Auburn Engineering Alumni Council Senior Faculty Research Award (2012), and the William F. Walker Merit Teaching Award (2014). As one of the founding members of Auburn University''s Center for Bioenergy and Bioproducts, Dr. Eden and his collaborators received the AU President''s Outstanding Collaborative Units Award (2012). At the 2009 Foundations of Computer Aided Process Design (FOCAPD), he was honored with the Best Faculty Contribution Award. Dr. Eden was selected to participate in the 2010 National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium. Dr. Eden received his M.Sc. (1999) and Ph.D. (2003) degrees from the Technical University of Denmark, both in Chemical Engineering. Dr. Eden was recently elected Director of the Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) Division of AIChE. Dr. Eden was also selected to co-chair the Foundations of Computer Aided Process Design (FOCAPD) conference in 2014.

Dr. John D. Siirola is a Principal R&D Member of Technical Staff in the Analytics Department at Sandia National Laboratories. His main areas of expertise are systems design, operations research, optimization modeling, and optimization algorithms. John''s research focuses on the intersection of computational tools with systems design and analysis; in particular, developing approaches for modeling highly structured systems, optimization algorithms that can exploit the expressed structure, and the application of these techniques to national security problems.

Much of John''s research is disseminated through open-source software projects. He leads the Acro project (optimization algorithms) and co-leads the Coopr project (optimization modeling). He is a core contributor to the Water Security Toolkit (modeling and analysis tools for drinking water distribution systems) and Dakota (optimization and uncertainty quantification), and contributes to numerous tools, including Utilib, PyUtilib, gcovr, and cxxtest.

John has a B.S. from Purdue University (2000) and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University (2005), both in Chemical Engineering. He is a senior member of the AIChE, member of INFORMS, and member of the COIN-OR Foundation. John currently serves on the COIN-OR Technical Leadership Council. He was also selected to co-chair the 2014 Foundations of Computer Aided Process Design (FOCAPD) conference.

Gavin Towler is the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of UOP LLC, a Honeywell company. UOP is a leading supplier of catalysts, process technology, proprietary equipment and services to the oil, gas and petrochemical industries. In this capacity he is responsible for delivering process, catalyst and equipment innovations for UOP''s four businesses.

Gavin has 20 years of broad experience of process and product design and has 65 US patents. He is co-author of "Chemical Engineering Design", a textbook on process design, and is an Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University, where he teaches the senior design classes.

Gavin has a B.A. and M.Eng. in chemical engineering from Cambridge University and a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley. He is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the Institute of Chemical Engineers, and is a Fellow of the AIChE.