Speakers & Panelists

Florian Schattenmann is Cargill’s Chief Technology Officer and Vice President for Innovation and Research & Development (R&D). He drives innovation for the Food enterprise, overseeing a global team dedicated to developing market and customer-driven solutions while still leading innovation and R&D efforts across Cargill. Florian also oversees the Food Safety Quality and Regulatory (FSQR) team in enhancing food safety standards and chairs Cargill’s Ventures Board, guiding strategic investments in innovative technologies. Under his leadership, his teams have received numerous accolades, including recognition from the Edison Awards for breakthrough innovations and from Fortune listing Cargill as one of America’s Most Innovative Companies.

Prior to joining Cargill in November 2018, Florian spent eight years at The Dow Chemical Company. His most recent role was Vice President for Performance Materials & Coatings R&D, where he led innovation across a diverse set of specialty businesses. Florian has also held leadership roles at SulphCo Inc., Momentive Performance Materials and General Electric (GE)-Bayer Silicones. Earlier in his career, Florian managed several research laboratories at the GE Global Research Center.

Florian is a certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt, holds seven U.S. patents and has numerous publications. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Vernay Laboratories Inc., a privately held specialty elastomer parts manufacturer. He serves on multiple advisory boards including the College of Science and Engineering at University of Minnesota, the Department of Chemistry at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the American Chemical Society CTO forum. He earned his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his Diplom Chemiker degree from the Technische Universität München in Munich, Germany.

Costas Pantelides is the CTO of Siemens Process Automation Software and also a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London. He was a co-founder, and subsequently CTO and CEO of Process Systems Enterprise Ltd., one of Imperial’s largest spin-out companies acquired by Siemens AG in 2019.

Costas has extensive experience in the area of digitalization for the process industries and its application to process design and operation. He has been the recipient of several awards including the 2007 Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award, the 2016 Sargent Medal of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, the 2019 Computing Practice Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and an honorary PhD from the Technical University of Dortmund. He is a Fellow of the UK Institution of Chemical Engineers and of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, and an international member of the USA National Academy of Engineering.

Leaelaf Hailemariam is an R&D Manager and Digital Innovation Leader at DuPont Water Solutions. He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University on the use of informatics in pharmaceutical product development in 2008. He then joined Dow, where he worked on product development and systems modeling. As part of DuPont Water Solutions, he was instrumental in the development of the WAVE modeling platform and led the development of the RO and UF Operations Advisors. He continues to lead and advance Digital and AI solutions in DuPont.  

Albert Goldfain, PhD, is Director of Data Science in the Digital Solutions and Engineering team at Ecolab. He leads a team responsible for AI for emerging programs and technologies and heads the Vision and Advanced Sensing AI (VAST-AI) lab. The core mission is to provide AI development support for early-stage programs and incubate commercially viable technical innovations.

Prior to Ecolab, Albert was a data scientist and senior researcher in the medical device industry. Albert previously presented at the Stahl Forum in 2024 and is excited to see how AI use cases and overall industry adoption has matured since that time.

Leo Chiang is a Senior Director at Corporate Technology of The Lubrizol Corporation. In this role, he leads the global Decision Science team toward enabling faster and more effective decision making across the enterprise, from faster product development, to process efficiency and productivity.

Prior to joining Lubrizol, Leo spent 24 years at The Dow Chemical Company. Most recently, he served as a Senior R&D Fellow in Core R&D, where he led the global R&D digital strategy, co-developed digital IP & monetization strategy, Generative AI and LLM strategy, and responsible AI principles.  

Leo has a B.S. degree from University of Wisconsin at Madison and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all in Chemical Engineering. Leo has co-authored 2 books, published over 70 externally referred journal and proceedings papers, and delivered over 170 conference presentations and university lectures. His work has achieved substantial external impact, with over 9,000 citations according to Google scholar.   

Leo is on a mission to improve data science and statistics acumen for the workforce at all levels. He is proactive in working with universities to support data science education in chemical engineering and the broader STEM community. Over the past decade, Leo served as a Computer Aids for Chemical Engineering (CACHE) trustee (2019-2024) and held a number of American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) leadership positions, including Executive Board of the Program Committee (EBPC) chair (2022), spring meeting program chair (2018), Industry 4.0 topical conference chair (2018-2020), Big data analytics topical conference chair (2015-2017), and  Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) director (2014-2016). 

Leo is currently a board member of the National Academies' Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology (BCST) and program chair of 2026 Foundations of Process/Product Analytics and Machine learning (FOPAM) meeting. Leo is a Fellow of AIChE and has received many recognitions including the 2016 Herbert Epstein Award, 2016 Computing Practice Award, American Automatic Control Council (A2C2) 2020 Control Engineering Practice Award, and European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS) 2025 Best Manager Award. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2023. 

Robert Duan serves as Vice President of Technology for Lubrizol’s Surface Science Business Division, leading a global research and development organization dedicated to innovation in material science, automation, and rapid prototyping across two business units.

Robert joined Lubrizol in October 2023, bringing over two decades of senior technology leadership experience across the coatings, polymers and materials industries. Robert spent over 13 years at Sherwin-Williams and Valspar, where he held roles including Vice President of R&D and Sr. Global Technical Director. Prior to that, Robert spent over 11 years at The Dow Chemical Company in various technology leadership roles.  Across these roles, Robert has demonstrated his strength in business partnership by increasing the efficiency of portfolio management, improving gross margins, and enhancing collaboration. He’s shown expertise in R&D by leading diverse technical teams. In addition to Dr. Duan’s leadership and management skills, he is a talented scientist and holds more than 35 granted patents.

Robert holds a Ph.D. in Polymer Chemistry and Material Science from the University of Minnesota, an MBA in Marketing Management from Rutgers University, an M.A. in Computer Science from the University of Detroit Mercy, and a bachelor's degree in Chemistry from the same institution.

Anand Chandrasekaran joined Schrödinger in 2019 and he is currently the Product Manager of AI/ML for Materials Science. His expertise is in applying machine learning to different areas in Materials Science and computational modeling. He graduated from the group of Professor Nicola Marzari in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne with a PhD in Materials Science. Before joining Schrödinger, Anand also worked in the group of Professor Rampi Ramprasad on a number of topics including polymer informatics, machine-learning force-fields, and machine-learning for electronic structure calculations.

Jayshree Seth is a Corporate Scientist at 3M and currently holds 81 patents for a variety of innovations, with several additional pending. She joined 3M in 1993 after an MS and PhD in Chemical Engineering from Clarkson University, New York. She is a Distinguished Alumni Award recipient from her alma mater REC Trichy India, now NIIT Trichy, where she earned a B. Tech. in Chemical Engineering. Jayshree was appointed 3M’s first ever Chief Science Advocate in 2018 to use her scientific knowledge, technical expertise and professional experience for advancing science and communicating the importance of STEM fields to drive innovation. She is also a member of Carlton Society which is the 3M Science and Innovation “Hall of Fame.” Jayshree is the fourth woman and first female engineer to be inducted. In 2020, she was awarded Society of Women Engineers (SWE) highest Achievement Award. She is also the first-ever winner of a Gold Stevie® Award in the new Female Thought Leaders of the Year – category in the 18th annual Stevie Awards for Women in Business in 2021. In 2025, Jayshree was named to the Thinkers50 Radar list and nominated for the prestigious Innovation Award. She was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2026.

Jayshree is a TEDx speaker and was also featured in a docuseries titled Not the Science Type that premiered during the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. She is the author of the books The Heart of Science – Engineering Footprints, Fingerprints, & Imprints,  The Heart of Science – Engineering Fine Print and The Heart of Science – Engineering Blueprint published by the Society of Women Engineers, and all sales proceeds of the trilogy go to a scholarship for women in STEM. She is a sought-after speaker, globally, on a multitude of topics such as innovation, leadership and STEM advocacy and has featured in local, national and international media.

Jayshree serves on the Board of FIRST, and also the Science Museum of Minnesota, as well as on the Education Outreach Subcommittee for the International Space Station (ISS) National Lab, Engineering Advisory Council for Clarkson University, American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) Industry Advisory Council, Advisory Board for Innovation - The Conference Board as Innovation Fellow, and Advisory Group of Aspen Institute Our Future is Science program. At 3M, Jayshree has served on the CEOs Inclusion Council, chaired the Asian Employee Resource Group A3CTION and serves on the Steering Committee for Technical Women’s Leadership Network (WLN).

Michail Vlysidis obtained his PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, studying and modeling the stochasticity of biochemical reaction networks. With over 8 years of experience in the industry, he has made significant contributions to the fields of scientific software development and engineering. Currently serving as a team leader at AbbVie, Dr. Vlysidis' primary focus is on supporting the biologics organization in capturing, analyzing, and modeling experimental data. He possesses a deep understanding of protein properties and leverages innovative modeling approaches to further enhance computational drug discovery.  

Jen McKay is an Internal Medicine/Hospitalist physician leading Google Health’s efforts within Cloud to “make billions of people be healthier.” An expert in healthcare operations, she has spent her career using technology to generate both clinical and financial outcomes. Prior to Google, Jennifer served as a CMIO for a large, integrated delivery network in the Upper-Midwest where she deployed technology to ensure that residents in rural areas had access to high quality care. She creates a culture of continuous improvement using her Care Transformation Framework to engineer out human error from care delivery while creating a safe system in which caregivers operate. At Google, she works closely with the Cloud engineering teams as they develop products and solutions for the Healthcare Industry. She trained at Washington University in St. Louis and later obtained a Master’s degree from Northwestern University in Healthcare Quality and Patient Safety. She comes to Google with 20 years of clinical experience and still practices medicine today.

Dan LeCloux is Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer for Ecolab Inc., the global leader in water, hygiene, and infection prevention technologies and services that protect people and vital resources.

As Chief Technical Officer, Dr. LeCloux is responsible for leading the global Research, Development, and Engineering organization. Combining a deep understanding of customer problems with technology leadership, Ecolab RD&E takes an innovative systems approach to deliver superior solutions. The global technical services team provides training and expertise that ensures Ecolab’s customers receive consistent, highly effective results.

Prior to joining Ecolab, Dr. LeCloux served as vice president of Research & Development with DuPont Electronics & Industrial, a $6B division of the DuPont Company. He was responsible for worldwide innovation strategy, investment, and product development.

Dr. LeCloux received his Bachelor of Science from the University of Minnesota and Doctoral degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. He currently serves as a member of the Industrial Advisory Board for the University of Minnesota’s Chemistry Department and the American Cleaning Institute Board of Directors.

A trusted partner at nearly three million customer locations, Ecolab (NYSE: ECL) is the global leader in water, hygiene and infection prevention solutions and services that help protect people, planet, and business health. With annual sales of $13 billion and more than 47,000 associates, Ecolab delivers comprehensive science-based solutions, data-driven insights, and world-class service to advance food safety, help maintain clean and safe environments, optimize water and energy use, and improve operational efficiencies and sustainability for customers in the food, healthcare, hospitality, and industrial markets in more than 170 countries around the world.

Raymond Chiu leads Central R&D at Solventum, where he advances science and technology through close collaboration across the businesses to commercialize solutions that empower healthcare professionals and improve patient outcomes.

He is a hands-on leader with deep experience in product commercialization and building high-performance global teams across diverse industries, geographies and customer segments. Prior to joining Solventum, Raymond spent 30 years at 3M, where he held various leadership roles including heading global R&D for divisions in Health Care and Transportation & Electronics. His teams delivered differentiated solutions addressing customer pain points through novel materials and processes ranging from glass ceramics and durable polymers to skin adhesives, biomaterials and digital technologies.

Raymond is a strong advocate for sustainability, championing design approaches that support a circular economy and reduce environmental impact. He is also deeply committed to mentoring future leaders and fostering diversity and inclusion. He actively participates in Employee Resource Networks and serves on the Board of the Boys and Girls Club of the Twin Cities.

Raymond earned a Ph.D. in Ceramics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a dual B.S. in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mike Kesti is the Senior Vice President of 3M’s Corporate Research Laboratory (CRL), a  position he has held since 2021. CRL is responsible for the development and deployment of  new technology across the global 3M R&D organization.  

Mike grew up in Eden Prairie, MN, attended Carleton College (BA degrees in Chemistry and  Economics) and earned a PhD in Chemistry from Stanford University in 1992 (under  Professor Bob Waymouth). Mike joined 3M’s Post-it® Note laboratory in 1993 where he developed new adhesives and water-based technologies for Post-it® Note products. He then spent 16 years in 3M’s Commercial Solutions Division in a variety of technology & product  development and lab leadership roles in support of 3M’s wide-format, graphic film and industrial cleaning businesses, eventually becoming the division’s Global Technical  Director. In 2016, he assumed leadership of the Personal Safety (PPE) Division’s global  laboratory which he led through the pandemic until his appointment to his current CRL role in 2021.  

Mike is currently a governing board member for DOD’s Starbase program and the University of St. Thomas’s School of Engineering; an advisory board member for the University of Minnesota’s Dept of Chemistry, the Colorado University Boulder’s Research & Innovation Office, and Innovation MN; and member of the Conference Board’s Innovation Leadership Council, the Innovation Outreach Program (IOP), and the American Chemical Society.  Previously he has held board member positions for the Signage Foundation and the Sustainable Green Printing partnership.

Alison Main is a Research and Development Vice President in Corporate Research & Development at Procter & Gamble. She has a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford in the UK and 30 years’ experience at P&G. During her career Alison has delivered product and process innovation for Laundry and Automatic Dishwashing detergents, Downy fabric softeners, Bounty, Charmin and Puffs paper goods, Duracell batteries and a variety of health care products.

She has a passion for transforming the way we work and has been a strong advocate for wide-spread use of modeling & simulation, data science and artificial intelligence to accelerate innovation. She is also passionate about people development and creating a winning organization and has led multiple interventions in career development, equality and inclusion and leadership culture.

Abhishek Roy is the Global R&D Leader of Digital and AI at Cargill, where he spearheads the development and execution of enterprise-wide AI strategies to transform research and innovation across the global food system. With over 15 years of experience in data science, machine learning, and data strategy, Abhishek has delivered high-impact AI solutions at Fortune 500 companies across sectors including Consumer-Packaged Goods, Retail, Insurance, Finance, and Manufacturing.

At Cargill, Abhishek leads a high-performing team of AI scientists focused on applying advanced AI technologies to accelerate the food innovation pipeline, enhance operations and solve some of the most complex challenges in agriculture and food systems.

Beyond the corporate world, Abhishek is a Senior Adjunct Faculty at the University of St. Thomas, where he teaches graduate-level courses in Data Engineering and Artificial Intelligence. He is also the co-founder of the Social Data Science Group, a volunteer collective applying data science for social good in partnership with nonprofits such as Generation NEXT, Avivo, and the Science Museum of Minnesota.

Abhishek holds a Master’s in Predictive Analytics from Northwestern University in Chicago. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with his wife, their five-year-old daughter, and two-year-old son.

Ju Sun is an associate professor of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (UMN). His research interests span computer vision, machine learning, numerical optimization, data science, computational imaging, and healthcare. His recent efforts are focused on the foundations and computation of deep learning, as well as on developing novel deep learning techniques to tackle challenging problems in science, engineering, and medicine. Before this, he worked as a postdoc scholar at Stanford University (2016-2019), and obtained his Ph.D. degree from Columbia University in 2016. He won the best student paper award from SPARS'15, an honorable mention of doctoral thesis for the New World Mathematics Awards (NWMA) 2017, AAAI New Faculty Highlight 2021, Frontiers of Science Award in Mathematics 2024, the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship of UMN (2025-2027), and the Guillermo E. Borja Career Development Award of UMN 2026.

Aryan Deshwal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CS&E) at University of Minnesota. His research agenda is AI to Accelerate Scientific Discovery and Engineering Design where he focuses on advancing foundations of AI/ML to solve challenging real-world problems with high societal impact in collaboration with domain experts. He won the College of Engineering Outstanding Dissertation Award for his PhD. He was selected as AAAI New Faculty Highlights Speaker (2025) and Rising Stars in AI by KAUST AI Initiative (2023). His research won the Innovative Deployed Application Award at IAAAI 2026 and he won multiple outstanding reviewer awards from machine learning (ICML (2020), ICLR (2021), and ICML (2021)) conferences. 

Ben Hackel is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota. He earned degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin (B.S., advised by Eric Shusta) and MIT (Ph.D., advised by Dane Wittrup) and performed postdoctoral research in the radiology department at Stanford University (Sam Gambhir). The Hackel Lab balances fundamental study of molecular evolution and protein biophysics, advancement of protein engineering platforms, and application of these advances to develop physiological molecular targeting agents for therapy and diagnostics in oncology, inflammation, and infectious disease.

Sapna Sarupria is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (UMN). Before joining UMN in Fall 2021, she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Clemson University. She received her Master’s from Texas A & M University and her Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She was a postdoctoral researcher in Princeton University. Her research focuses on using molecular simulations to tease out the underlying phenomena governing material behavior. Her research lab integrates molecular simulations and machine learning, and works closely with wet-lab experimentalists. She received the NSF CAREER award, ACS COMP Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Clemson’s Board of Trustees Award of Excellence and the CoMSEF Impact Award. She is the co-founder of the NSF-funded Institute of Computational Molecular Science Education (I-CoMSE). She is also the co-director of the NSF-funded National Research Traineeship program (NRT) Data-Driven Discovery and Engineering from Atoms to Processes (3DEAP) housed in the CEMS and Chemistry departments at UMN. 

Chris Bartel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science (CEMS) at the University of Minnesota. Prior to joining CEMS in 2022, he earned a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Colorado under the supervision of Prof. Charles Musgrave and Prof. Al Weimer before joining Prof. Gerd Ceder’s group as a postdoctoral researcher in Materials Science at Berkeley. Chris now leads the “Design of Materials on Computers Lab,” which leverages first-principles calculations, thermodynamic modeling, solid-state chemistry, and machine learning to accelerate the design of solid-state materials for energy-related applications. He has been recognized as a McKnight Land Grant Professor, an Emerging Investigator by the journal Materials Horizons, and a Scialog Fellow in both Negative Emissions Science and Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials. Chris grew up near New Orleans and earned a BS in Chemical Engineering from Auburn University.

Bernard T. Agyeman is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. in Process Control from the University of Alberta, Canada in 2025, where his research focused on the design of irrigation scheduling algorithms for large-scale agricultural systems, combining optimal control techniques with machine learning methods to improve water use efficiency and crop yield. His research now focuses on graph-based and learning-augmented methods for mixed-integer optimization, as well as risk-aware stochastic MPC frameworks with hard resource constraints, applied to irrigation scheduling under weather uncertainty.

Prodromos Daoutidis is a College of Science and Engineering Distinguished Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota. He is also the Founding Director of the M.S. degree program in Data Science for Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and the Director of the “Data Driven Discovery and Engineering from Atoms to Processes” National Science Foundation Research Traineeship Program. He received a Diploma degree in Chemical Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, M.S.E. degrees in Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering: Systems from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan. He is the recipient of the IChemE Sargent Medal and Hutchison Medal, the AIChE Sustainable Engineering Forum Research Award, the AIChE Computing in Chemical Engineering Award, the C.A. Floudas Award in Mathematical Optimization, the PSE Model Based Innovation Prize, and Best Paper Awards from the Journal of Process Control and Computers and Chemical Engineering.  Daoutidis  has supervised to completion 44 Ph.D. students and post-docs, 15 of whom currently hold academic positions. His current research is on analysis, control, and optimization of complex and networked systems. 

Jnana Sai Jagana is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate advised by Prof. Qi Zhang in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her work focuses on developing optimization models and algorithms for the design and scheduling of industrial electricity consumers while leveraging demand response programs in electricity markets. Prior to joining Prof. Zhang's group, Jnana got her bachelor's degree in chemical engineering with a minor in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. 

Qi Zhang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and worked at BASF as a Conceptual Process Engineer prior to joining the University of Minnesota in 2018. His research in the broad area of process systems engineering focuses on computational optimization, decision-making under uncertainty, interpretable data analytics, and human-AI collaboration, with applications in sustainable energy and process systems, supply chain management, and bioengineering. Qi is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Junior Sargent Medal and the Hutchison Medal from the Institution of Chemical Engineers, and the AIChE CAST Outstanding Young Researcher Award.