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Christodoulos (Chris) A. Floudas (born 1959 in Ioannina, Greece) is prominent Greek Chemical Engineer who was the Stephen C. Macaleer '63 Professor in Engineering and Applied Science, Emeritus, and Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Emeritus at Princeton University. He served on the Princeton faculty for 29 years before moving to Texas A&M University in February 2015, where he held the positions of Director of the Texas A&M Energy Institute, and the Erle Nye ’59 Chair Professor for Engineering Excellence . He supervised over 40 doctoral students and more than 20 post-doctoral associates.

Floudas earned an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from the University of Thessaloniki in 1982, and a PhD in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1986 working with Professor Ignacio Grossman. His thesis, "Synthesis and Analysis of Flexible Energy Recovery Systems" focused on novel methods for the optimization of Heat Exchanger Networks.

He was a world-renowned authority in mathematical modeling and optimization of complex systems, with research interests at the interface of chemical engineering, applied mathematics, and operations research. Principal areas of focus were multi-scale systems engineering for energy and the environment, chemical process synthesis and design, process operations, discrete-continuous nonlinear optimization, local and global optimization, and computational chemistry and molecular biology. His research accomplishments earned him numerous awards and honors, including election to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2011, to the Academy of Athens in 2015, and to the U.S. National Academy of Inventors in 2015. He was the author of over 300 refereed publications and had delivered over 330 invited lectures, seminars, and named lectureships.

Floudas suddenly passed away on August 14 while on vacation with his family in Greece.

In 2012, his research played a key role in a white paper from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers that proposed a method to form a national system to create synthetic fuels. He was the author of two graduate textbooks and co-editor of the 4,600-page Encyclopedia of Optimization. During his career, Floudas was an author of more than 300 scholarly articles. The scientific publisher Thomson Reuters said in multiple years that Floudas’ papers ranked in the top 1 percent of those cited in their research fields.