Plenary Speakers
Cleo Kontoravdi
Imperial College London
Cleo Kontoravdi is Professor of Biological systems Engineering at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Imperial College London. She holds MEng and PhD degrees from the same department and previously worked at Lonza Biologics as a Research and Development Scientist. Her principal research area is the development and optimisation of animal cell culture systems for therapeutic protein production. Her group works on three challenges: enhancing the quality of these drugs to make them more potent at lower doses and therefore more affordable, making cell systems more productive, and developing alternative platforms for producing personalised biotherapeutics.
Jay H. Lee
University of Southern California
Jay H. Lee received his Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from Caltech in 1991. After having been a faculty member of various universities, including Auburn, Purdue, Georgia Tech, and KAIST, he is currently a Choong Hoon Cho Chair and Professor of Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at University of Southern California (USC). From 2013-2023, he served as the founding director of Aramco-KAIST CO2 Management Center. He is a Fellow of IEEE, IFAC and AIChE. He is a recipient of many awards including NSF Young Investigator Award, AIChE’s Computing in Chemical Engineering Award, and Roger Sargent’s Lectureship. He published ~300 manuscripts in SCI journals with more than 22000 citations. His research interests are in the areas of model-based control and machine learning with applications to energy transition and sustainability.
Daniel Abramovitch
Agilent Technologies
Danny Abramovitch earned degrees in Electrical Engineering from Clemson (BS) and Stanford (MS and Ph.D.), doing his doctoral work under the direction of Gene Franklin. He has spent most of his career at Hewlett-Packard Labs and Agilent Labs, moving to Agilent’s Mass Spectrometry Division in 2014 to work on improved real-time computational architectures for mass spectrometers. Danny is a Fellow of the IEEE and has held leadership positions at multiple American Control Conferences, including serving as Program Chair in 2013 and General Chair in 2016. Since then, he has led outreach efforts from the controls field including a highly popular set of “practical methods” workshops. He is the holder of over 25 patents and 65 reviewed technical papers. For these efforts, he recently received the American Automatic Control Council’s inaugural Babatunde A. Ogunnaike Control Practice Award, recognizing significant contributions to the advancement of control practice (formerly known as the Control Engineering Practice Award).
Danny has spent his years in industrial research working with mechatronic control problems (optical and hard disks, atomic force microscopes) and instrumentation systems, from Agilent’s award winning first 40bps BERT to the award winning Ultivo Tandem Quad Mass Spectrometer. A consistent theme has been the need to modernize the connectivity between test benches, instrumentation, and CAD software. The need to have personally connected the pieces “from the physics to the web page” has given him a highly utilitarian view of the foundational work that needs to be done to make physical systems truly data driven. Over the past decade he has focused much of his effort on how to teach the principles, limitations, and requirements of feedback systems to people outside the traditional controls community including high school and college STEM students, scientists and practicing engineers, as well as the general public.