Laurent Simon

Prof Laurent Simon earned a Ph.D. in Chem­ical Engineering from Colorado State University in 2001 and joined the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in fall 2001. He acted as the Associate Director of the Pharmaceutical Engin­eering Program from December 2006 to January 2013. Currently, he is working as an Associate Pro­fessor at NJIT. Dr. Simon is the author of Labora­tory Online, a series of educational and interactive modules that help engineers build a strong under­standing of drug-delivery technologies and their underlying engineering principles. Dr. Simon has received the Excellence in Teaching Award, Master Teacher Designation, Newark College of Engin­eering Saul K. Fenster Innovation in Engineering Education Award and a Distinguished Teaching Award from the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE).

His research and teaching interests include mod­eling, analysis and control of drug-delivery sys­tems. He has co-authored forty-nine research articles, two books, six book chapters and made several presentations. For six years, Professor Simon taught and designed courses in biotech­nology with the goal of helping to prepare stu­dents for the world of 21st century science and technology. One of his specializations is in bio­engineering process control (Dissertation : Con­trol of amino acid starvation-induced apoptosis in CHO cell cultures). This experience puts him in a unique position to integrate bio-process dynamics and control in the ChE curriculum. He taught a Bio-related course for three years during which he assigned a host of problems ranging from reactor dynamics to drug ingestion, distribution and metabolism in an effort to enrich learning and increase students participation. Considering the impact of biotechnology on our everyday lives, chemical engineering students should have the opportunity to apply principles of automatic con­trol to bioprocesses through instructional mod­ules, an area that remains largely unexplored in the ChE undergraduate curriculum in spite of sev­eral recent efforts and contributions. Dr. Simon’s current research activities involve modeling and solution procedures for physically-enhanced delivery systems and development of a web-based computing platform to perform simulations of controlled-release devices. He is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and a reviewer for Mathematical Reviews, American Mathematical Society.