Congratulations to Dr. Victor Zavala, the newly elected 2023-2025 Director. Victor M. Zavala is the Baldovin-DaPra Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a computational mathematician in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He holds a B.Sc. degree from Universidad Iberoamericana and a Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University, both in chemical engineering. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Process Control, Mathematical Programming Computation, and Computers & Chemical engineering. He is a recipient of NSF and DOE Early Career awards and of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He has also received a Best Paper Award from the Computers & Chemical Engineering journal in 2019. His research interests include statistics, control, and optimization and applications to energy and environmental systems. Dr. Zavala has been an active member of the CAST and PSE communities for more than 13 years. He has organized, chaired and presented in numerous sessions at AIChE meetings (both 10C and 10B). He served as the Area 10B Programming Coordinator in 2018 and has served on the scientific committees of the ADCHEM and NMPC conferences. Dr. Zavala is currently co-chairing the FOCAPO/CPC-2023 conference with Drs. Baldea, Harjunkoski, and Bindlish. As CAST Director, Dr. Zavala would work to further enhance collaboration and joint activities with other AIChE divisions as well as international organizations in PSE with an eye towards fostering synergies in the emerging areas of data science and artificial intelligence. Dr. Zavala will also aim to keep increasing CAST student membership and visibility (at both undergraduate and graduate level) and to develop initiatives to diversify the community (by fostering integration of members of underrepresented communities) and to strengthen collaborations with industry. In addition, he will aim to expand participation of researchers from developing countries from Latin America and Africa.
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