Automation authors honoured by international society #PAuto #ISAuto #ISAutowk

"Each year, ISA is proud to recognize and thank all of the talented authors and contributors who help develop, review and deliver outstanding ISA publications and technical resources to automation and control professionals throughout the world," says Susan Colwell, manager of ISA's Publications Department.

Best seller 2012

This year's awards ceremony was held in concert with the 2013 ISA Automation Week technical conference, which took place last November. Winners are recognised for their editorial contributions to a wide range of ISA publications, including ISA books; InTech, ISA's bi-monthly magazine for automation and control professionals; and ISA Transactions, ISA's bi-monthly professional journal dedicated to the science and engineering of measurement and automation.

Awards and award recipients
• The Keith Otto Award recognized the author of the best article in InTech magazine. The award was presented to Chuck Mina for his article in the March/April 2012 issue of InTech entitled, “Disposable automation – Single-use technologies for biopharmaceutical manufacturing.”  Mina is deputy director of Automation Engineering at Sanofi Pasteur (the vaccines division of Sanofi) in Swiftwater, Pennsylvania, USA. He also has worked on a variety of biotechnology projects at Amgen and Eli Lilly.

• The Nels Tyring Award recognizes the author of the best published article in one of the Society’s journals. Dennis Brandl is this year’s recipient for his July/August 2012 InTech article on factory automation, “Business-to-shop integration realized through B2MML.” Brandl is the chief consultant for BR&L consulting, which specializes in manufacturing IT and flexible manufacturing solutions. He has been involved in MES, batch control, and automation system design and implementation in a wide range of applications over the past 25 years.

The John McCamey Award recognizes promising young authors who publish their first article in one of the Society’s publications. This year’s award also recognizes one of the important tenets of the ISA Mentor program, which is to foster publishing by practitioners to advance knowledge in the automation profession and provide recognition to the individual. The award recipients are ISA Mentor program protégés Danaca Jordan and Héctor Torres, and their mentors Hunter Vegas and Greg McMillan, for their article in the January/February 2013 issue of InTech titled, “Enabling New Automation Engineers.”

Danaca Jordan is a manufacturing staff engineer at Eastman Chemical Company in the US. She focuses on automating and optimizing batch logic and operations while managing capital improvements. In high school, she was a team captain in the FIRST® Robotics Competition.

Héctor Torres is a senior process and control engineer at Eastman Chemical in Mexico.  Actively involved in the ISA Mentor Program, Torres possesses more than 15 years of experience in process and control engineering and project management.

Hunter Vegas, P.E., is a senior lead project engineer at Avid Solutions, Inc. He has executed nearly 2,000 instrumentation and control projects over his career, and is an expert in field instrumentation sizing and selection, safety interlock design, electrical design, advanced control strategy, and numerous control system hardware and software platforms.

Greg McMillan, an ISA Fellow, is a retired Senior Fellow from Monsanto-Solutia. McMillan has received many prominent awards in the automation field. In 2003, he was honored by InTech magazine as one of the most influential innovators in automation. He received the ISA Life Achievement Award in 2010. McMillan established the ISA Mentor program in 2011.

• The Raymond D. Molloy Award is presented in honor of Raymond D. Molloy’s contributions to the automation profession. Molloy was a major driving force in the ISA publications program for more than 20 years and maintained a keen interest in ISA’s publication of high-quality books that met the needs of measurement and control professionals. This award was presented to Terry Blevins, Willy Wojsznis, and Mark Nixon, who are the 2012 best-selling ISA authors for their book Advanced Control Foundation: Tools, Techniques and Applications. Their book sold the most units of any new book published by ISA in 2012.

Terry Blevins is a principal technologist in the future architecture team of DeltaV Product Engineering at Emerson Process Management. Blevins has worked as a systems engineer and group manager in the design and startup of advanced control solutions for the pulp and paper industry for more than 15 years. An accomplished author, he has written more than 70 papers on process control system design and applications.

Willy Wojsznis is a member of the future architecture team of DeltaV Product Engineering at Emerson Process Management. Wojsznis has been involved in the development of advanced control products for more than 20 years, focusing on model predictive control, data analytics and auto tuning. His work has resulted in more than 30 patents and more than 40 technical papers.

As a member of the wireless team at Emerson Process Management, Mark Nixon takes an active role in the development of the WirelessHART specifications and the development of the IEC 62591 standardization. Nixon’s current research includes control using WirelessHART devices, data analytics for batch processes, wireless technology in the process industry, web-based user interfaces, operator interfaces and advanced graphics. He has written numerous papers and currently holds more than 45 patents.

• ISA Transactions Best Paper Award recognizes the best technical paper published in ISA Transactions in the previous year. The winning paper, “Robust control strategies for an electric motor driven accumulator with elastic web,” (ISA Transactions, Vol. 51, Issue 6), ” was judged to be the best paper published in the journal in 2012. Former ISA Transactions Editor-in-Chief Russ Rhinehart presented the award to Dominique Knittel, who accepted it on behalf of his co-authors, David Kuhm and Mari-Ange Bueno.

Dominique Knittel, Ph.D., is a full professor in control and mechatronics at the University of Strasbourg in France, where he has worked since 1992. His research interests include modeling and robust control, mainly for industrial Roll-to-Roll systems. Since 1999, he has been the head of the French research group in Roll-to-Roll systems. He has directed more than 30 doctorate and master thesis.

David Kuhm obtained a Master’s degree in Industrial Computing and Automated Systems at University of Strasbourg (France) in 2007 and a Ph.D. in Mechanics-Mechatronics in 2011. He was research assistant at the Engineering School INSA Strasbourg 2010-2012. Currently, he is deputy technical director at Schroll Company, Strasbourg.

Marie-Ange Bueno obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Haute Alsace (Mulhouse, France) in 1995. Since 2005, she has served as full Professor in the School of Engineering ENSISA (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Ingénieurs Sud Alsace, Mulhouse) in the fields of textile and mechanical science and engineering.