Our team
Richard West
Richard read Chemical Engineering at the University of Cambridge, completing his BA and MEng degrees in 2004. He was among the first cohort to spend a year at MIT on the undergraduate exchange program of the Cambridge-MIT Institute. He returned to MIT for a semester of core graduate classes at the start of his PhD, also in Chemical Engineering at the University of Cambridge. His thesis work, in the Computational Modelling Group of Prof. Markus Kraft, was on modeling the chloride process for the gas-phase synthesis of titanium dioxide nano particles. He finished in 2008 and returned to MIT once more, this time as a postdoctoral research associate working with Prof. William Green to develop detailed kinetic models and the tools used to create them. In 2011 he moved across the river to Boston, starting the Computational Modeling in Chemical Engineering group at Northeastern University. In 2018 he became an Associate Professor (with tenure) and the Associate Chair for Graduate Studies in the Department of Chemical Engineering, a position he held until his sabbatical in 2020.
Graduate Students
Chris Blais
PhD student
Chris received his BS in Chemical Engineering in 2015 from the University of New Hampshire. He worked as a Project Engineer for Superior Controls for four years commissioning and designing industrial control systems. He joined the Computational Modeling group as a PhD student in Chemical Engineering at Northeastern.
Chao Xu
PhD student
Chao received a BS in Chemistry from Dalian Jiaotong University, China in 2017. He completed an MS in Chemical Engineering in the Computational Modeling group in 2020 then became a PhD student. His undergraduate research was related to synthesis and characterization of luminescent nanomaterials. During his MS year, he worked as a research assistant on High throughput screening ELISA at EMD Serono, Merck KGaA.
Sevy Harris
PhD student
Sevy received her BS in Electrical Engineering in 2014 from Ohio State and her MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 2016. She worked on Microsoft’s HoloLens for three years, designing flexible printed circuits and later writing test software for the depth camera module. She joined the Computational Modeling group in 2020 and is working towards her PhD in Chemical Engineering.
Su Sun
PhD student
Su received a BS in Chemical Engineering in 2015 from Georgia Institute of Technology and a MS in Materials Science in 2017 from University of Southern California. He worked as a process engineer at Jet Plasma for two years developing thin film deposition technology. He joined the Computational Modeling group in 2021 as a PhD student.
Nora Khalil
PhD student
Nora received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Connecticut. Her undergraduate research focused on the use of lipid-based nanoparticles in drug delivery, as well as the design of microfluidic devices for use in personalized cancer treatment/research. She has also completed an internship at Henkel, where she worked to develop new fabric softeners. She joined the Computational Modelling Group in 2021 and is working towards her PhD in Chemical Engineering.
Ted Raymond
PhD student
Ted did a B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Bioengineering, and an M.Eng in Biological Chemical Engineering at Lehigh University. He works full time as an Engineer (IV) in Process Chemistry and Development at Takeda, and is simultaneously completing an industrial PhD in Chemical Engineering in our group.