Alumna Shweta Singh wins AIChE Early Career Award
Shweta Singh ('12), previously a member of Bhavik Bakshi's Sustainable Engineering Research Group and now an assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering and environmental and ecological engineering at Purdue University, received the 2021 American Institute of Chemical Engineers' (AIChE) Environmental Division Early Career Award for her research on the advancement of systems methodologies for Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and creation of cloud-based computational tools for sustainability assessment. AIChE is the world’s leading organization for chemical engineering professionals, with more than 60,000 members from more than 110 countries.
“This award recognizes the critical role of interdisciplinary engineering in solving major environmental challenges today by creative pursuit of innovative modeling and computational tools,” Professor Singh said. “It is a testimony of rigor, innovation and hard work of Purdue students who are eager to solve the toughest problems that advances the scientific field of environmental science and engineering for building a sustainable world.”
Singh was nominated for the award by Rakesh Agrawal, the Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering. The award presentation will take place at the November AIChE Annual Meeting, where Singh has been invited to give an address.
“I am humbled and thankful for this recognition by AIChE, especially because solving the issue of climate change and resource sustainability is an urgency for our planet now,” Singh said. “I am also very grateful to the support of colleagues and leadership of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, and Environmental and Ecological Engineering for enabling a truly interdisciplinary culture at Purdue, and to Ohio State's Professor Bhavik Bakshi for being a wonderful mentor and initiating me in this field."
Singh joined Purdue Engineering in 2014. She leads the Sustainable Industrial Natural Coupled Systems (SINCS) group whose research focuses on coupling the growth of biobased economy and industry with local and global ecological sustainability. Prior to joining Purdue, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto from 2013-2014. She received her BTech in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (2006), and both her MS in Applied Statistics (2011) and PhD in Chemical Engineering (2012) from The Ohio State University.
"It is a wonderful recognition," said her former advisor at Ohio State, Richard M. Morrow Professor Bhavik Bakshi. "Her work shows how the principles of chemical engineering can be used to address many of the most pressing challenges humanity faces today. I wish her all the best in her future endeavors."
While a student in Bakshi's group, Singh won the Best Paper Award from AIChE's Sustainable Engineering Forum (SEF). The paper was published in Environmental Science and Technology in March 2015. One of SEF's goals is to help achieve sustainable development with chemical engineering.
