Professor Ruth Misener

Ruth Misener is a professor at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London. Her research concentrates on the development of software and optimisation algorithms for energy efficient engineering and biomedical systems. She develops underlying algorithms that power optimal decision-making under uncertainty. At Imperial, she leads a research team of computer scientists, engineers, and applied mathematicians. Her research focuses on the type of computational optimisation challenges arising in industry, for example scheduling in manufacturing or experimental design in chemicals research. She also actively develops the interface between operations research and machine learning.

In 2012 she was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship for her postdoctoral training with Efstratios N. Pistikopoulos at Imperial College London. She has several industry collaborations, including being academic friend for ExxonMobil. In 2017 she was awarded an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship for “software development for novel engineering research”. The aim of this fellowship was to develop new “decision-making software constructing and deploying next generation process optimisation tools”. In 2022 she was awarded a highly prestigious BASF/Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Data-driven Optimisation. She has co-authored several publicly available software tools for global optimisation including, APOGEE (pooling), GloMIQO (mixed-integer quadratically constrained quadratic programs) and ANTIGONE (mixed-integer nonlinear programs).

She is the director of the Computing & Systems Technology Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. In 2013 she was awarded the Journal of Global Optimization award for Best Paper.In 2014 she won the American Institute of Chemical Engineers W David Smith Graduate Student Paper Award. In 2017 Misener won the Sir George Macfarlane Medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering for excellence in the early stage of her career. She also won the 2017 Royal Academy of Engineering Engineers Trust Young Engineer of the Year. She was included in the Innovation category of American Institute of Chemical Engineers 35 Under 35 list

As a professor at Imperial, she collaborates with super smart, hard-working, and creative students. Using both traditional lectures and open-ended projects, she mentors and teach Imperial students as they prepare for their technical careers.