Introduction to a Special Section on Teaching Data Science

Martha A. Grover is a Professor in the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, and Associate Chair for Graduate Studies.  She earned her BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and her MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Caltech.  She joined Georgia Tech as an Assistant Professor in 2003.  In 2011 she received the Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the Computing and Systems Technology Division of AIChE, and in 2019 the Himmelblau Award for Innovations in Computer-Based Chemical Engineering Education.  Martha is the chair of the CAST division of AIChE and the vice-president of the educational nonprofit CACHE Corporation. Her research program is dedicated to understanding, modeling, and engineering the self-assembly of atoms and small molecules to create larger scale structures and complex functionality. Her approach draws on process systems engineering, combining modeling and experiments in applications dominated by kinetics, including surface deposition, crystal growth, polymer reaction engineering, and colloidal assembly. 

Phillip R. Westmoreland is a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University. His research focus is fundamental reaction kinetics for energy, environmental, and industrial applications. He was previously a Research Engineer in the coal-conversion program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1974-79, professor in the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1986-2009, Progam Officer at the National Science Foundation in 2006-2009, and 2015-16 Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College.  He was 2013 President of AIChE, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and is a currently a trustee of CACHE Corporation, having served as its president in 2004-06. He is a past board member of the Combustion Institute (2002-2014), the Council for Chemical Research (2005-07), and AIChE (2009-11), and he was the founding Chair of AIChE’s Computational Molecular Science and Engineering Forum.