Virginia Sommer earned her Chemical Engineering degree from the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently a Process/Specialty Engineer at Fluor Corporation with many years of refinery and chemical plant design experience. She has worked on various projects, from refinery revamps to grassroots renewable fuel facilities, and now she is currently managing the Process work for a very successful client program of projects. Prior to Fluor, she worked in a manufacturing facility, where she managed the process and packaging aspects of one division and was able to optimize and economize parts of the process.
In 2008, she co-authored a paper about a complex refinery hydrogen system that she and her team modeled, which she then presented at the 2009 AIChE Spring Meeting. After that, her desire to become more involved with AIChE grew, and every year since then, she has attended and been involved with the Spring Meeting. She has chaired and co-chaired many Fuels and Petrochemicals Division (F&PD) sessions for the Spring Meetings since 2010. She has also been previously involved with organizing the AIChE-F&PD Student Outreach Programs, and she has also been a CTOC member. She had been involved with programming for F&PD for many years, starting with the sessions she had chaired and growing to the T7 Refining Area Programming Chair and then to the Overall F&PD Programming Chair for the Spring Meetings. She also continues to be involved as the Programming Chair for the AIChE Southwest Process Technology Conference.