Antonios Fytopoulos is currently a PhD candidate at KU Leuven. He graduated from the Hellenic Army Academy in 2006 as an officer and pursued a military career, where he received numerous awards and currently, he holds the rank of Major. In 2018 he received his diploma from the School of Chemical Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens, where he graduated in the top 5% of his class. His research interests include crystallization, process optimization, modeling and deracemization methods. His current work focuses on Population balance - based optimization of Viedma Deracemization. He has participated and presented his research at several national and international conferences and coauthored articles in international peer-reviewed journals.Dr. Rohit Ramachandran is currently Associate Professor & Chancellor’s Scholar at the Dept. of Chemical & Biochemical Engineering and the Engineering Research Center of Structured Organic Particulates, at Rutgers University. He received his B.Eng and M.Eng in Chemical Engineering, with a minor in Law, from the National University of Singapore in 2003 and 2005 respectively. This was followed by his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Center of Process Systems Engineering, Imperial College London in 2008. Thereafter he pursued a postdoctoral associate position at the Dept of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His current research interests are in modeling, control, optimization and experimental validation of pharmaceutical and chemical processes. He has published more than 100 peer reviewed journal articles and has presented his work at numerous national and international conferences as well as at invited seminars at various universities and industrial companies. He has won several awards such as the NSF Career award for young faculty, two NIPTE Young investigator awards, the Rutgers Chancellor’s Scholar award, the Rutgers Board of Trustees award for research excellence and the AIChE Process to Development QbD award for contributions in pharmaceutical drug product manufacturing.Panos M. Pardalos serves as Distinguished Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida. Additionally, he is the Paul and Heidi Brown Preeminent Professor in Industrial & Systems Engineering. He is also an affiliated faculty member of the Computer and Information Science Department, the Hellenic Studies Center, and the Biomedical Engineering Program. He is also the Director of the Center for Applied Optimization. Dr. Pardalos is a world leading expert in global and combinatorial optimization. His recent research interests include network design problems, optimization in telecommunications, e-commerce, data mining, biomedical applications, and massive computing. He has co-authored and co-edited more than 30 books, as well as publishing more than 600 journal articles and conference proceedings. Prof. Pardalos is a Fellow of AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), Fellow of American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and EUROPT. He is a Distinguished International Professor by the Chinese Minister of Education; Honorary Professor of Anhui University of Sciences and Technology, China; Elizabeth Wood Dunlevie Honors Term Professor; Honorary Doctor, V.M. Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics of The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; Foreign Associate Member of Reial Academia de Doctors, Spain; and Advisory board member of the Centre for Optimisation and Its Applications, Cardiff University, UK. He is also the recipient of UF 2009 International Educator Award; Medal (in recognition of broad contributions in science and engineering) of the University of Catani, Italy; EURO Gold Medal (EGM); Honorary Doctor of Science Degree, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada; Senior Fulbright Specialist Award; University of Florida Research Foundation Professorship; and IBM Achievement Award.
