Carl Laird
Sandia National Lab
Carl Laird (SNL) has over 10 years of experience in academia, including 7 years at Texas A&M University, and 5 years at Purdue University. Carl Laird joined Sandia National Laboratories in 2016 and holds adjunct appointments in the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University and the Chemical Engineering department at the University of Arkansas. Dr. Laird’s research interests include large-scale nonlinear optimization and parallel scientific computing. Focus areas include chemical process systems, power grid optimization, and homeland security applications. Dr. Laird is the recipient of several research and teaching awards, including the CAST Division Outstanding Young Researcher Award, National Science Foundation Faculty Early Development (CAREER) Award, and the Montague Center for Teaching Excellence Award. He is also a recipient of the prestigious Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software and the IBM Bravo award for his work on the open-source package, IPOPT, a software library for solving nonlinear, nonconvex, large-scale continuous optimization problems. He is also a member of the team winning an R&D 100 Award for Pyomo, a general package for optimization. Dr. Laird earned his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon in 2006 and his Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the University of Alberta.