Prof. Venkat
Venkatasubramanian is a Professor of
Chemical Engineering and a Professor
of Industrial and Physical Pharmacy (by courtesy) at Purdue University.
He received his Ph. D. in Chemical Engineering (with a Minor in
Theoretical Physics) from Cornell University, M.S. in Physics from Vanderbilt University,
and B. Tech. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Madras,
India. Venkat worked as a Research Associate in Artificial
Intelligence in the School
of Computer Science at
Carnegie-Mellon
University and taught at Columbia University before joining Purdue in 1988.
At Purdue, Venkat
directs the research efforts of several graduate students and
co-workers in the Laboratory
for Intelligent Process Systems. Prof.
Venkatasubramanian's research contributions have
been in the areas of process fault diagnosis and abnormal events
management, risk identification and management in complex engineered
systems, pharmaceutical engineering and informatics, product design
via discovery informatics, systems biology, and complex adaptive
systems using knowledge-based systems, neural networks, genetic
algorithms, mathematical programming and statistical approaches.
His teaching interests include process design, process
control, pharmaceutical engineering, systems biology, complex
adaptive systems, artificial intelligence, statistical physics, and
applied statistics.
Prof. Venkatasubramanian
has published over 160 refereed papers, and delivered over 125
invited lectures and seminars, including twelve keynote/plenary
lectures, at various international conferences and institutions all
over the world. He has authored a three-volume CACHE case study on
Knowledge-based Systems for Heuristic Classification Problems in
Process Engineering. He also co-authored two books,
Advanced Knowledge Representation
and Handbook of Diffusion and
Thermal Properties of Polymers and Polymer Solutions. Venkat has been the co-editor of two books,
Intelligent Systems in Process
Engineering and Computer
Aided Molecular Design. Venkat has chaired or co-chaired over
thirty international meetings, conferences, and sessions in the
areas of artificial intelligence applications in process
engineering. Twenty five Doctoral and seven Masters students have
graduated under Venkat's
supervision. Venkat has
been a consultant to several major global corporations and
institutions such as Air Products, ALCOA, American Cynamid, Arthur
D. Little, Amoco, Caterpillar, DowAgro Sciences, Eli Lilly, Exxon,
GE, Honeywell, Lubrizol, United Nations (UNIDO and UNDP), Indian
Oil, ICI (U.K.), Nova Chemicals, G.D. Searle (Pfizer) and others.
Prof.
Venkatasubramanian's contributions have been
recognized by several awards and honors. He was the 1990 recipient
of the Eminent Overseas
Lectureship Award from the Institution of Engineers in Australia. He was a guest co-editor
of the Special Issue of
Computers and Chemical Engineering on
Neural Networks in 1992. In 1993, he was awarded the
United Nations Development Program Invited Lectureship at the Indian
Institute of Technology,
Delhi,
India. He
received the Norris Shreve
Award for Outstanding Teaching in Chemical Engineering in 1993,
2004 and 2006, and the
Teaching for Tomorrow Award in 2004, both awarded by
Purdue
University. He is an
academic trustee and past-President of the Computer Aids for
Chemical Engineering (CACHE) Corporation, a non-profit organization
for the promotion of computers in chemical engineering education.
He served on the editorial board of the
Process Safety Progress. He currently serves on the Editorial Board
of Computers and Chemical
Engineering.
In 1996, Industry week
magazine selected him as “one of the fifty R&D stars in the United States whose achievements are shaping the
future of our industrial culture and America's technology policy”. His
co-authored paper on fault diagnosis was awarded the
CAST Directors’ Award for the
Best Poster Presentation at the AIChE Annual meeting in
Los Angeles, Nov 2000.
Venkat and his
students were awarded the Best
Paper Prize for 2002-05 from the
Journal of Engineering
Applications of Artificial Intelligence, sponsored by
the International Federation
of Automatic Control (IFAC), for a paper on abnormal events
detection and process risk management. Recently, his co-authored
paper on informatics won the
2006 Best Paper Prize
from Computers
and Chemical Engineering. He is a co-recipient of the
Team Research Excellence Award
from the College
of Engineering, Purdue University,
in 2007, for his contributions to the development of the discovery
informatics framework for molecular products design. In 2007, Venkat
was recognized for his outstanding teaching record as the only
faculty member in the College of Engineering
to be elected as a Fellow of
the Teaching Academy, the highest honor Purdue bestows for
excellence in teaching.
