Laird awarded Swearingen Professorship

At a formal ceremony, Carl Laird was awarded the John E. Swearingen Professorship of Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering.

Laird is head of the Department of Chemical Engineering and director of the Center for Advanced Process Decision-making.

Laird's work at the intersection of optimization, data science, and process systems engineering is internationally recognized. With high-performance computing techniques for large-scale nonlinear optimization and parallel scientific computing, he has had particular impact in the areas of public health, critical infrastructure, energy systems, and machine learning. Laird's research group has developed several highly-regarded open-source software packages.

He has been recognized with the INFORMS Computing Society Prize in 2019, the Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (CAST Division) in 2015, the Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software in 2010, and the National Science Foundation Early Career Development award.

The ceremony also honored John Kitchin as a John E. Swearingen Professor of Chemical Engineering.

George Brown and the Brown Foundation established the John E. Swearingen Professorship of Chemical Engineering in 1980 to support a faculty member in the Department of Chemical Engineering. John Swearingen earned a master of science degree in chemical engineering in 1939 and received an honorary doctorate in 1981 from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now the College of Engineering.

For media inquiries, please contact Lauren Smith at lsmith2@andrew.cmu.edu.