Metin Turkay is a Professor and Head of the Department of Industrial Engineering at Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey. He holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University (1996) and MS (1991) and BS degrees (1989) from Middle East Technical University. His research focuses on optimizations theory, mixed-integer programming, and development of novel solution algorithms for mixed-integer programming problems and machine learning. He is applying these theoretical developments on energy planning, sustainable energy, sustainable supply chain management and logistics, design of transportation system with special emphasis on sustainable supply chain and logistics and systems biology. Before joining Koc University in 2000 where he set up Systems Lab, he was principal consultant on optimization technologies at Mitsubishi Corporation Mizushima Research Center. His doctoral work and publications on generalized disjunctive programming was recognized with the 1997 Ted Peterson Student Paper Award by Computing and Systems Technology Division of AIChE. He is also the recipient of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) Career Award (2005), the TÜBİTAK Young Researcher Incentive Award (2006), Turkey’s first IBM Shared University Research Award (2007), the IBM Faculty Award (2009) and the Open Collaborative Research Award by IBM Haifa Research (2012). He set up the Koc-IBM Supply Chain Research Center with funds from the IBM Shared University Research Award. In 2006, he was elected as the Chair of the EURO Working Group on Computational Biology, Bioinformatics and Medicine. RAFIQUL GANI, PhD, is currently an adjunct professor at KAIST (South Korea) and a visiting professor at Texas A&M University. For 34 years Prof Gani, starting from 1985, worked at the Department of Chemical & Biochemical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, and is the former head and co-founder of CAPEC. Prof Gani served as an editor-in-chief of Computers and Chemical Engineering journal (2009-2015) and currently serves as editor for the Sustainable Production & Consumption journal. He is also a member of the editorial advisory boards of several international journals, including Computers and Chemical Engineering and Current Opinion in Chemical Engineering. Prof Gani has been awarded Doctor Honoris Causa degrees from University Politehnica Bucharest, University of Pannonia and Babes-Bolyai University. Prof Gani is the ex-president of the EFCE (2015-2018), a member of the Danish Academy of Science, a Fellow of the AIChE and a Fellow of IChemE. He received the AIChE Computers in Chemical Engineering award in 2015, the EFCE Jacques Villermaux Medal in 2019 and the AIChE Sustainability Engineering Forum award in 2020. Prof Gani is the winner of the Sargent Medal in 2021. In 2018, Prof Gani co-founded the PSE for SPEED Company, that develops, implements and employs state of the art PSE methods and tools to solve a wide range of problems of industrial and research significance, reliably, efficiently and very rapidly. He has published 600 articles in peer reviewed international journals and proceedings plus 5 edited books and 1 text-book. His publications have given him a H-index of 68 in GoogleScholar, 57 in SCOPUS and 52 in Web of Science (December, 2020). Prof Gani’s current research interests continue with the development and application of computer aided methods and tools for modelling; property estimation; process-product synthesis, design & intensification; and process-tools integration with emphasis on energy, sustainability and application of a systems approach.
