David A. Liñán Romero wins the Chemical Engineering Medal for Proficiency in Research-Park and Veva Reilly Medal
David Liñán Romero has won the Chemical Engineering Medal for Proficiency in Research (Park and Veva Reilly Medal). The award recognizes skill in solving a research problem and efficiency in finding solutions. The award consists of a silver medal and a cash award.
“Winning this award makes me feel gratitude towards those who have encouraged and supported my research and academic development—not only my advisor and colleagues, but also my family and friends,” says Liñán Romero."My PhD research was in numerical optimization, so I feel this award also recognizes the relevance of computational tools in aiding chemical engineering to shape a more efficient and sustainable future.”
Liñán Romero was a PhD student in the Department of Chemical Engineering supervised by Professor Luis Ricardez-Sandoval. He completed his doctoral studies in September 2024.
Liñán Romero’s main takeaways from studying with Ricardez-Sandoval were the importance of critical thinking and reasoning, as well as effective oral and written communication.
During his PhD, Liñán Romero focused on optimal decision-making for industry. He worked to find optimal approaches to design and allow production processes to operate profitably and efficiently. He focused on general optimization methods with a wide application scope in chemical, food processing, mining, energy, pharmaceutical, among other industries.
Using optimization tools to advance sustainability
Liñán Romero has previously engaged in collaborations between academia and industrial partners to advance sustainability goals, such as developing a process to reuse food waste in the baking industry while enrolled at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia.
He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Mathematics at KTH in Sweden, conducting research in simulation-based optimization. In his research at KTH, Liñán Romero is collaborating with a mining company interested in making production more sustainable, by moving to renewable fuels such as hydrogen.
He is engaged in research to decrease the production of harmful gases and energy requirements, making mining post-processing more environmentally friendly. Romero does this work all on computers through simulation and optimization.
“The advantage of using simulations is that they rely on accurate models of what could happen and provide insights into the outcomes,” Liñán Romero says."You don't need to rely on costly experiments; with simulations, you get to the solutions faster and cheaper. Then, the role of optimization is to efficiently use simulations to predict a variety of outcomes and make practical decisions based on economic or sustainability objectives."
In recognition of Liñán Romero’s Park and Veva Reilly Medal win, he was invited to present a webinar for students in the Department of Chemical Engineering titled Local mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) through ordered-discrete variable decomposition: A new paradigm for MINLP optimization in chemical engineering.