Warren D. Seider

2025

- What is your current position?
I have been a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania over the last 57 years.

- What are your professional interests?
I work on computer-aided process analysis, simulation, design and control with applications including conversion of algae to biofuels and bioproducts, combustion of natural gas for power and carbon sequestration, protecting against rare safety events, and bifurcation control of high-dimensional nonlinear chemical processes.

- Why did you become a CACHE trustee?
In 1969, I became a 'founding member' of CACHE and have participated actively since then. We created CACHE to actively develop computer-aids for teaching chemical engineering. We have also created over 35 conferences to advance the development of computing in chemical engineering research and teaching, emphasizing the latest activities in many areas.

- How has CACHE helped you and the ChemE community?
I initiated the first Student AIChE/CACHE Mobile Device APP Competition at the AIChE 2013 Meeting and competitions in 2014 and 2015 meetings. Prof. Martha Grover and I conducted a national survey on Computing in Chemical Engineering which helped to convince me to create a course on numerical methods using Python. This has led to several workshops on numerical methods for the 2017 and 2022 ChE summer schools.