Two students from our group, Cristian García-López and Kimberly Rasgado, are in the last stages of their Master of Science theses. Cristian had a research stay at the Energy Institute of Texas A&M University, hosted by Professor Stratos Pistikopoulos, while Kimberly was for six months at the University of Salamanca, Spain, hosted by Dr. Mariano Martín.
Two of our research works were presented at the 2019 AIChE Annual Meeting in Orlando, FL. We also had the pleasure to participate with a guest talk in a special session honoring the 70th birthday of Professor Ignacio Grossmann. The session was crowded with his former students, current students (his and from outside), collaborators and colleagues, all of whom shared the respect for Ignacio that he has harvested during his brilliant career.
Julio César Díaz-Gómez has finished his stay at the University of Alicante, Spain, which he enjoyed as part of his doctoral program. His thesis is related to the design of a shale gas-based industrial park, a project we have undertaken in collaboration with Dr. José Caballero.
Ricardo Tusso, who did a six-month stay in our research group as part of his doctoral program, has obtained his Doctoral degree from the University of Cartagena, Colombia. Ricardo defended his thesis on June, 2020. His work in our group dealt with the intensification of an ethyl lactate process, which he developed together with Arick Castillo-Landero, and that was recently published in Chemical Engineering & Processing: Process Intensification.
Andrea Paulina Ortiz-Espinoza defended her Doctoral dissertation “Including Inherent Safety in the Design and Evaluation of Chemical Processes” on October 30, 2020. Paulina’s work led to 5 papers published in prestigious PSE journals. She is starting a postdoctoral stay at Carnegie Mellon University hosted by Professor Ignacio Grossmann.
In January 2020, Andrea Paulina Ortiz-Espinoza started an internship at Carnegie Mellon University, as part of a collaboration with Professor Ignacio Grossmann. The project seeks to integrate the concepts of inherent safety developed by our research group with those of reliabiity developed by Professor Grossmann’s group.
This past July 3rd, 2020, Salvador Pérez-Uresti presented his Doctoral of Science defense, which, as has become a hopefully temporary need, had to take place online. Salvador’s thesis was titled “Design of renewable plants for energy and utilities”, which included the development of a superstructure for the integration of technologies for the production of electrical energy and four types of steam utilities, based on renewable resources such as solar energy, wind energy and biomass. This project was the result of a collaboration with Dr. Mariano Martín, of the University of Salamanca, Spain, where Salvador enjoyed a one-year stay as part of his doctoral program.
Since 2018, we have had in our group the pleasure of hosting Dr. Kelvyn Baruc Sánchez-Sánchez as a Postdoctoral Fellow, supported by a 2-year grant from Conacyt. Among other things, Kelvyn is an expert in software development, and has integrated valuable software packages for the estimation of thermodynamic properties that are available online. Kelvyn has also given short courses on the Julia programming environment that have enhanced the group’s research resources.
Each year, the Sustainability Engineering Forum (SEF) of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers recognizes the best paper in the field of Sustainable Engineering published with a student as a first author. Two members of our group, Karen Guillén Cuevas and Andrea Paulina Ortiz Espinoza were given the SEF-AIChE award for the best paper in 2018. They were the first co-authors of the paper «Incorporation of Safety and Sustainability in Conceptual Design via a Return on Investment Metric» (ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, 6, 1, 2018, 1411-1418). This was the first time that such an award was given to students from an Ibero-American institution. Karen and Paulina presented a plenary lecture as part of the award ceremony during the AIChE Annual Meeting 2018 celebrated in Pittsburgh, PA.