Invited Speakers
Keynote Speakers
Dan Cherowbrier is the chief technology officer (CTO) of Formula E, responsible for the championship's comprehensive technical strategy. He oversees broadcast technology, racing and safety services, cybersecurity, and the innovation road map.
Prior to joining Formula E, Cherowbrier spent over a decade as an innovative technical leader and management consultant, specializing in the media and sports industries. He continues to serve as a fractional CTO for the UIM E1 Series. Earlier in his career, Cherowbrier managed high-availability systems in media and telecommunications, taking on senior roles at Arqiva and Babcock International Group. He also holds patents for audience data-collection technologies. Cherowbrier holds a BSc with honors in broadcast media technology from Ravensbourne College of Design & Communication.
Taylor Garrick started his career at General Motors (GM) in 2017 with the Global Propulsion Systems group after receiving his doctorate in chemical engineering from the College of Engineering and Computing at the University of South Carolina. He spent three years in the advanced engineering group working on the Chevrolet Volt and Chevrolet Bolt before joining the Virtual Design, Development, and Validation group to focus on developing mathematical models for battery and battery system design.
Currently, he is the virtual propulsion technical specialist for battery cell electrochemistry at GM, where he serves as a technical leader for a team focused on applying electrochemical models to the development of energy storage devices and systems.
Garrick is a board member of the Industrial Electrochemistry and Electrochemical Engineering division of the Electrochemical Society. He also serves as an associate editor for the Journal of the Electrochemical Society, focused on mathematical models, battery systems, and the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to industrial electrochemistry.
As a result of his engineering efforts, Garrick is a six-time recipient of the Boss Kettering Award, the highest technical award given by GM. His technical contributions span 37 pending and granted US patents, as well as more than 60 technical journal articles.
Rui Aguiar is an engineer, researcher, and entrepreneur. Early in his career, he worked alongside Andrew Ng, the former head of Google Brain, where he contributed to the field of artificial intelligence and published multiple papers on reinforcement learning and computer vision systems.
Following his research tenure, Aguiar applied his technical expertise to the startup ecosystem, successfully building a company operating at the intersection of computer vision and hardware engineering. Today, he is the CEO of Cosmon, where he focuses on the next frontier of software development by building advanced, agentic tools for engineers.
Hannah Alpert received her PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University. She is currently working as an aerospace systems engineer at NASA Ames Research Center in the Entry Systems and Vehicle Development Branch. Her work includes heat shield design, post-flight analysis, instrumentation, and thermal modeling.
Dr. Jongyoon Han is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received a BS (1992) and an MS (1994) in physics from Seoul National University, South Korea, and a PhD in applied physics from Cornell University in 2001. He received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award (2003) and the Analytical Chemistry Young Innovator Award (ACS, 2009).
Dr. Han’s current research focuses on engineering innovative microfluidic solutions for various industrial applications, including bioprocessing and biomanufacturing, desalination and water purification, and biosensing. He is currently the lead principal investigator for MIT’s participation in the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL). He is also a co-lead principal investigator for the CAMP Interdisciplinary Research Group (IRG) at the SMART Center in Singapore, where novel critical quality attributes (CQAs) for cell therapies are being developed.
Dr. Edvin Cetegen is a principal engineer at Intel® Corporation in Chandler, Arizona. He works in Intel® Foundry’s Advanced Packaging Technology Manufacturing division, where his focus is on the design, manufacturing, and reliability of next-generation Intel® semiconductor packages. Dr. Cetegen is an active inventor and holds 20 fully granted patents, all in the field of semiconductor packaging.
Panelists
Ed Fontes is vice president of development for the COMSOL Group, where he is responsible for leading the development of all COMSOL products. He has been with COMSOL for more than 25 years. Before becoming a vice president, he led the development of the company's Chemical Engineering, Fluid Flow, and Heat Transfer products. He holds a PhD in electrochemical engineering and has worked in the field of multiphysics simulation throughout his career.
Dr. Alessandro Alabastri is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University, USA, where he leads research in computational nanophotonics, multiphysics modeling, and light-driven energy and material systems. His work combines electromagnetic, thermal, and transport modeling to understand and design nanoscale optical devices, metasurfaces, photothermal systems, and light-harvesting technologies. He is also director of the Rice Applied Physics Graduate Program and codirector of the Rice Center for Cavity Quantum Electrodynamics (RCCQ). At Rice, he teaches graduate-level finite-element and multiphysics modeling and has organized COMSOL Multiphysics® workshops and poster sessions for the university community. His broader interests include photothermal energy conversion, solar desalination, photocatalysis, and cavity-enhanced light–matter interactions.
Temesgen Kindo is an associate director for Advanced Process Analytics at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. His experience spans research & development, process development and scale-up, and commercial manufacturing of small molecules, biologics, cell and gene therapies, and combination products. Before joining the pharmaceutical industry, Kindo obtained a PhD from Duke University, where he researched computational mechanics, and worked at COMSOL, Inc. as an applications engineer specializing in structural mechanics, multiphysics, and equation-based modeling. His current scientific interests are in hybrid modeling and model-based design of experiments.
Dr. Canan Karakaya is a senior scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory specializing in catalytic reaction engineering, multiscale modeling, and process scale-up. Her work bridges fundamental catalytic science and applied chemical engineering through multiscale modeling frameworks that connect catalyst-level phenomena to reactor and process performance. She develops physics-based and data-driven models to support predictive understanding of catalytic systems and accelerate the scale-up of catalytic technologies.
Her expertise includes transport phenomena, intrinsic kinetics, and computational fluid dynamics for chemically reacting flow, along with digital twin development for complex reactive systems. Her research spans sustainable fuels, methane conversion technologies, syngas conversion, ammonia synthesis and decomposition, and hydrogen production. She uses multiscale modeling for reactor design advancement, process intensification, and technology deployment.
