James B. Riggs has been a professor of chemical engineering at Texas Tech University since 1983. He received his BS and MS degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and his Ph.D. degree in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He co-founded the Texas Tech Process Control and Optimization Consortium (www.che.ttu.edu/pcoc/) in 1992 and has more than 80 technical publications on process modeling, control and optimization. He is the author of An Introduction to Numerical Methods for Chemical Engineers (1988, 1994) and co-author of Basic Principles and Calculations in Chemical Engineering, 7th Edition (2004). In addition, he has a total of over five years industrial experience.
M. Nazmul Karim is a professor and the Department Chair of Chemical Engineering at Texas Tech University. He received the BSc. (Honors) degree in Chemical Engineering from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka. He earned his MSc. degree in Control Engineering and Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, U.K. Before joining Texas Tech University in 2004, he taught at Colorado State University for more than twenty years. He has published widely in the area of bio-process control. Dr. Karim was the Director of the Advanced Industrial Bio-Processing Short Course, which he offered at Colorado State University for over twenty years. More than 130 companies have participated in this course. Dr. Karim has co-authored seventy refereed journal papers and published hundreds of conference papers, and has given numerous invited and keynote talks in professional meetings. He has co-edited a book, Modeling and Control of Biotechnical Processes 1992, with Professor Gregory Stepanopoulos (MIT). He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.