Dr Antonio del Rio Chanona has been awarded the Nicklin Medal by the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE).

Dr del Rio Chanona is among 26 chemical engineers recognised by IChemE for outstanding contributions to the profession in industry and academia.

The Nicklin Medal is an early careers award and was introduced in 2014 to recognise talented chemical engineering researchers.

"It’s a privilege to be recognised by IChemE and I’d like to thank the judges for selecting me." Dr Antonio del Rio Chanona Department of Chemical Engineering

The supporting information given for Antonio’s award credited him as an “exceptional young scientist whose research will have a significant impact in areas of process systems engineering, industrialisation of bioprocesses, and adoption of intelligent and autonomous learning algorithms to chemical engineering.”

Commenting on the award Dr del Rio Chanona said: “It’s a privilege to be recognised by IChemE and I’d like to thank the judges for selecting me.

I'd also like to thank my PhD supervisor Vassilios Vassiliadis, colleagues Benoit Chachuat, Nilay Shah and Omar Matar from Imperial College, and collaborator Dongda Zhang from the University of Manchester for their support in the early stages of my career.

I’m very excited by the prospect of the next stage of my career where I’ll be able to further develop my research into merging the process systems approach with new AI technologies to address some of the biggest challenges in systems engineering domain.”

After receiving his PhD from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge, Dr del Rio Chanona joined the Centre for Process Systems Engineering (CPSE) as an EPSRC Research Fellow. In April 2020 he will become a Lecturer in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London and head of the Optimisation and Machine Learning for Process Systems Engineering group.