Dr. Zitney serves as Director for the AVESTAR™ Center and also directs Process & Dynamic Systems Research under NETL's Regional University Alliance (NETL-RUA). He has over 20 years experience in process systems engineering R&D, with a strong emphasis in the areas of steady-state and dynamic process simulation and optimization; real-time operator training systems (OTS) and 3D virtual immersive training systems (ITS); process/equipment co-simulation and computational fluid dynamics (CFD); and advanced numerical methods and high-performance computing.
Before joining NETL in 2004, Dr. Zitney held senior consulting and R&D management positions at Fluent, a leading provider of CFD software, Aspen Technology, a major supplier of process simulation software, and Cray Research, a leading provider of supercomputing tools to the process industries. He received M.S./Ph.D. degrees in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering and Engineering & Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University.
Dr. Zitney has authored and co-authored over 70 publications, 120 conference presentations, and 40 invited presentations in process systems engineering. He is currently a Trustee of the CACHE Corporation, member of the West Virginia Academy of Science, and an active member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) including Meeting Programming Co-Chair for the 2012 AIChE Annual Meeting to be held in Pittsburgh, PA. He has also chaired and co-chaired numerous technical conference sessions and served as the Director of AIChE's Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) Division. In addition, Dr. Zitney is the winner of numerous awards including four prestigious R&D100 Awards and six Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) Awards for Excellence in Technology Transfer.