FOCAPD 2024 was a smashing success!

The 10th Foundations of Computer-Aided Process Design conference was held from July 14-18, 2024 in Breckenridge, Colorado. Held every five years, FOCAPD is the premier conference in field of chemical process design. FOCAPD has single session, invitation-only speakers during the day, and then poster sessions from contributed papers at night. It is run by CACHE, but this year we invited AIChE to join us as a co-organizer who assisted in the on-the-ground logistics and planning.

The conference was a smashing success! We had a record number of attendees at 206, helped in part by successful NSF grant which paid for the registrations of 44 students and postdocs. We hosted 42 invited speakers, 132 posters were presented, and 144 total papers were published in the Proceedings. The material covered five key themes: Advances in PSE Design, Design & Emerging Fields, Design & Energy Transitions, Design & Sustainability, and Design Education & the Future of Design. The invited speakers included senior active researchers and professionals (some having come to all 10 conferences since 1980!) and others well-established in their middle career, but also highlighted some exciting early career researchers who are bringing new and interesting directions to the field. Some of the invited speakers also included the winners of the Best Paper Award and the winner and runner-up of the FOCAPD Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation (best PhD thesis in the field between 2019-2024). We hope we will be able to keep this tradition in future FOCAPDs.

Also new this year was a switch to using PSE Press for our proceedings publications, which is the CACHE Foundation’s publishing house. The proceedings are in the Systems and Control Transactions open access book series so that everyone can easily access the work of our community for free. You can check them out at https://psecommunity.org/sct3. We note this should be an attractive option for other CACHE-sponsored conferences or other conferences in the field.

The poster sessions were as always extremely popular—so popular in fact that hotel staff had to rearrange the entire room to accommodate all the guests. Despite sessions ending at 10pm, many attendees remained well into the night every night. The lunchroom was always packed and attendees enjoyed coffee and snacks in the back throughout all of the oral sessions. Many colleagues and friends reunited, with registration staff often taking pictures for them in front of the FOCAPD welcome signage.

Drs. Matt Bassett, Selen Cremaschi, Monica Zanfir, and I (Tom Adams) were the co-chairs in charge of most conference planning over the past four years. We thank the 81 members of the International Scientific Committee supported the conference by nominating the speakers and peer-reviewing the contributed papers. We also thank our sponsors Lilly, Chemstations, Auburn University Chemical Engineering, Linde, Princeton Chemical and Biological Engineering, Texas A&M Energy Institute, Purdue University Chemical Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison Chemical and Biological Engineering, Corteva, and Eastman Chemical for sponsoring the conference at record levels, helping to making it a huge success.

However, conference activity continues as the co-chairs are guest editors in an upcoming special issue of Computers and Chemical Engineering, where the best papers from the conference will be invited to submit follow-up papers. Invitations will be emailed out in the coming weeks, with publication dates anticipated in mid 2025.

Overall, FOCAPD was a fantastic event, a benefit for CACHE and a boon to the PSE Community. We encourage others to consider becoming a co-chair at some future FOCAPD to help the future events be even better.